“ANTRAL does not manipulate anybody nor does it have the money to do so as Uber does”, said Almeida before adding “judges are not open to manipulation. I neither know the judge nor was heard by the court. Consequently, from the outset, justice was done according to the laws that we have.”

Almeida explained that his association “wanted and attained a situation where everybody complies with the law” and hence the block put on the Uber sites made sense as otherwise the company “would have the conditions to continue operating in the market.”

ANTRAL announced Tuesday that the Lisbon Central Court had agreed to serve an injunction against the Uber transport application in Portugal with the latter’s European representative Mark MacGann unhappy at the situation.

MacGann told Lusa that ANTRAL had "manipulated" the legal process in Portugal to get a "national level judge to violate European law."

The Uber leader of European operations said ANTRAL had copied events in Madrid to get an injunction taken out even before the case had been heard and were seeking only to defend their respective monopolies from the competition new technology was bringing.

A ruling by a Lisbon court banning the mobile app Uber from being used in Portugal is “provisional” only, since it takes the form of an injunction, Portugal’s Secretary of State for Tourism stressed on Wednesday.

Uber, which refers to itself as a technology company, serves to match people offering passenger transport services - who are not necessarily licensed as a taxi - with potential clients.

Lisbon’s Central Court has accepted the protective order lodged by Lisbon taxi association Antral, prohibiting the app from being used for this purpose in Portugal, the association announced on Tuesday, adding that the company must immediately take down its website for the country. On Wednesday, the managing director for Uber Portugal said he had not received any notification of the decision, and that the company had not been heard by the court.
But the tourism secretary, Adolfo Mesquita Nunes, stressed the temporary nature of the ruling.
“So far as I have understood, this is an injunction, so it’s a provisional decision,” he said, declining to comment further on the basis that he has not read the ruling or its legal basis.
Uber was set up in the US city of San Francisco in 2009 and is already present in some 140 cities in 40 or so countries, but has met corporative and official resistance in several.