Manuel Pinho

Manuel António Gomes de Almeida de Pinho (born 28 October 1954) is a former Portuguese Minister of Economy and Innovation (2005–09) who achieved greater notoriety after he left office for being prosecuted and convicted on multiple charges of passive corruption, tax fraud, and money laundering. In 2024 he was sentenced to 10-years in prison and a fine in the amount of 4.9 million euros that he was shown to have received while in office in secret lump sum and monthly offshore pay-offs from his longtime mentor Ricardo Espírito Santo Salgado in exchange for benefitting Salgado's Espírito Santo Financial Group that Pinho rejoined after he left office. Pinho has remained under house arrest since 2021, which was extended in April 2025 when his appeal to overturn the conviction was denied by Lisbon's First Appellate Court. As of November 2025, a subsequent appeal to Portugal's Supreme Court was pending and a complaint against the Portuguese state had been filed with the European Court of Human Rights. Manuel Pinho has admitted to improperly receiving payments offshore and evading the related taxes but has argued that those payments were owed to him and refuted the corruption charges publishing to that effect two books where he and his defense lawyer dispute the guilty verdict.

In October 2024 he was charged with a second batch of passive corruption charges, this time for having favored Portugal's EDP - Energias de Portugal electricity company (EDP) with regulatory concessions deemed worth 840 million euros in exchange for EDP paying Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs to hire him as an adjunct professor paid for directly from annual earmarked EDP grants in the amount of 1.2 million euros. The timing of this arrangement was subsequently deemed as evidence of Pinho's passive corruption in that the EDP grants were set up for Pinho personally and timed exactly to hire him after he left government. This led to Pinho's indictment in 2017, after which he stopped lecturing at Columbia but he was only formally charged, along with the top two EDP managers who approved the grants, in October 2024 after his first conviction on passive corruption charges to the benefit of Ricardo Salgado's ESFG. As of November 2025, this case had not gone to court.

As minister, Pinho's main focus was to promote renewable energies generation in Portugal and, according to himself, after being hired by Columbia University he also lectured at 6 other universities in the US, China and Australia.

He is also remembered in Portuguese popular culture for an outburst in 2009 in the Portuguese Parliament that forced his resignation and was reported by mainstream media worldwide.