Asked at the daily press conference in Brussels about when a decision could be expected, the Competition spokesman, Ricardo Cardoso, said it was “difficult to anticipate at this stage”, because the Commission “just received” the initial information from Portugal about the plan to inject capital into the CGD.

On 31 May, Portugal’s finance minister, Mário Centeno, said that “it has not yet been decided how much to inject into the CGD, saying the process “is being debated with the European institutions, such as the Directorate-General for Competition, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Single Supervisory Mechanism, which will take some time”.

“We all know the restrictions that these regulations impose. It is necessary to understand the Caixa Geral de Depósitos statutes in the Portuguese banking system as a bank that is state-owned, both in its relevance in the system and in the state ownership.