Key figures — as of 2026-09-25: AIMA president Pedro Portugal Gaspar — in post since 29 July 2024 — has been nominated to a board seat at the Competition Authority (AdC), heard by Parliament on 22 September 2026 — no successor has been named — AIMA issued 386,000 residence permits in 2025, a 60% rise on 2024, while an estimated 40,000–60,000 cases remain actively pending — this is AIMA's second leadership change since the agency replaced SEF in October 2023.
A second president out the door
AIMA is about to lose its leader for the second time in under two years. The president of Portugal's Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum is set to leave his position for a new role at the Competition Authority, with Pedro Portugal Gaspar selected for the position of board member at the Portuguese Competition Authority (AdC). He appeared before Parliament's Economy and Territorial Cohesion Committee on 22 September as part of the appointment process.
For the tens of thousands of people with a file sitting in AIMA's queue — a first residence card, a Golden Visa renewal, a family reunification — the timing lands awkwardly. There is, as of this writing, no confirmed replacement, no interim leadership plan made public, and no signal on whether the agency's current push against its backlog will keep momentum or stall while a new appointment process plays out.
Who's leaving, and why it matters
Gaspar took over AIMA just under a year after the agency was created, replacing its first president, Luís Goes Pinheiro. Before taking charge of AIMA, Gaspar was Director-General for Consumer Affairs, having previously spent a decade at the head of Portugal's Food and Economic Safety Authority. He holds a law degree from the Portuguese Catholic University and a master's degree in Administrative Law from the University of Lisbon. His move to the AdC is a return to a regulatory brief closer to his consumer-protection roots, not a promotion within the migration file.
That's exactly what worries the sector's own frontline staff. Portugal's migration technicians' union has publicly flagged the departure as serious, arguing the agency needs stability, adequate resources and leadership with real knowledge of the sector rather than another change at the top just as it tries to prove the backlog fight is working. The union's core complaint, echoed across Portuguese outlets covering the resignation, is that AIMA is being run on a series of short-term, circumstantial fixes rather than a settled strategy — and that a leaderless agency sends the wrong signal at a politically sensitive moment for immigration policy.
The backlog Gaspar leaves behind
The numbers Gaspar inherited, and the numbers he leaves behind, tell most of the story. AIMA's own figures show it issued 386,000 residence permits in 2025, a 60% jump on 2024's total, and the government has repeatedly cited a headline figure of roughly 93% of pending files resolved. Immigration lawyers have pushed back on what that statistic actually captures, since it lumps archived and rejected files together with genuine approvals — and independent legal estimates put the residual actively pending caseload at somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 files as of early 2026, as GrowIN Portugal has previously reported (see our AIMA backlog analysis).
Run the arithmetic on Gaspar's own tenure and the scale of the turnaround becomes clearer. AIMA's inherited backlog stood above 400,000 cases when he took over in mid-2024; if the residual pending caseload really has fallen to the 40,000–60,000 range cited by legal sources, that implies AIMA cleared roughly 18,000 cases a month on average across his time in charge — a genuinely fast institutional pace by SEF-era standards, even allowing for the disputed "resolved" definition. That's the pace whoever succeeds him will be expected to match, or beat, while a separate government pledge to clear the Golden Visa backlog within 2026 still hangs unresolved.
"A leadership vacancy at AIMA is the last thing tens of thousands of pending Golden Visa and residency files needed right now," says GrowIN Portugal Editorial.
What foreigners with pending files should watch
Nothing changes procedurally overnight — renewals still run through the Portal das Renovações, appointments already booked should stand, and the six-month grace periods on expired cards remain in force under existing rules. The real risk is drift: a caretaker period at the top of AIMA, historically, has coincided with slower internal decision-making even when frontline processing continues. Applicants mid-file, particularly on Golden Visa or D7/D8 routes, should keep every document, deadline and proof-of-submission carefully archived, and treat any AIMA communication as time-critical rather than assume extra flexibility while the agency is between presidents.
Anyone with a residence or Golden Visa application currently stuck in the system should check our visas hub for the latest procedural detail, and consider professional guidance if a file has stalled well beyond AIMA's stated timelines — outcomes and timing ultimately rest with the agency, not with any adviser's promise. GrowIN Portugal will update this story once a successor is confirmed.