This year marks the coming of age of Portuguese banks. Twenty-one years ago, the licensing of the first foreign banks signalled a tentative opening up of a sector that had undergone wholesale nationalisation in 1975 following the leftwing “revolution of flowers”. The first private domestic banks set up shortly afterwards and in 1986 the long process of reprivatisation began.
In the succeeding two decades, Portuguese banks have been transformed almost beyond recognition. Families whose banks were seized by the state, like the Espírito Santos and Mellos, bought them back and turned them round. In 1985, a handful of northern businessmen provided financial backing for a new bank, now Millennium BCP, which today is not only Portugal’s biggest financial group, but also the country’s largest company.
