Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea-Bissau and Kenya appear in Portugal’s Central Department of Investigation and Prosecution (DCIAP) indictment to charge 24 defendants (13 individuals and 11 companies) with criminal association, aggravated trafficking, money laundering and document falsification in a cannabis criminal investigation triggered by Portugal’s medicines regulator.
Vasco Bettencourt, Director of the Licensing Unit within Infarmed’s Inspection and Licensing Directorate (pictured here), said the regulator had strengthened supervision of traceability, waste management and the qualification of customers and suppliers after weaknesses in those areas triggered the criminal investigations.
Speaking at the Portugal Medical Cannabis (PTMC) conference in Lisbon on 10 September 2026, Bettencourt told operators that the tightened oversight and extended licensing that had caused delays throughout the country’s medical cannabis sector and which unsettled the market were now over and that export certificates could now be issued within 12 days.
Portugal is Europe’s largest medical cannabis exporter, but the enforcement drive and the permit backlog that followed forced many supply chains to reroute elsewhere, threatening the country’s long held reputation as the ‘doorway’ to European cannabis markets.
The indictment states that the criminal network forged import certificates to declare cannabis as bound for Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea-Bissau, and Kenya, then rerouted it to European markets.
One certificate attributed to a Guinean authority carried an expiry date of February 30, 2024, a date that does not exist, and was still cleared. Also, around 5 533kg was declared for export to DRC across 2024 and 2025 with no corresponding import recorded by that country. Furthermore,a 357kg consignment to Kenya in 2025 was set against an approved national import estimate of 300 grams.
The filings indicate Infarmed was deceived by the paperwork rather than complicit in it. However, this has done little to quell criticism from both industry and authorities.
Verifiable production data to give the regulator reliable data from a new national reporting platform and a quarterly reporting model, approved in June 2026, have since been devised.
A judicial police investigation dubbed ‘Erva Daninha’ (Weed) led the DCIAP to charge the implicated parties in May 2025.
Meanwhile, the regulator revealed that 79 883kg of cannabis was exported in 2025, with more than 66 000kg shipped in the first half of 2026 alone.
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