Who has charged your bank account like that, and what for? Did you set up a direct debit with someone?
Normally the applicant pays at the ARI submission stage based on the ‘DUC’ invoice generated by the SEF portal. No charges should be applied to your bank account at the pre-approval stage (as far as I am aware).
I forwarded your question to my lawyer as if it was mine, let’s see what the response will be…
1st part of the mystery is solved; the fee taken out of my account was actually a service fee that my bank charged me for preparing the required declaration for SEF. now I’m trying to find out why they’ve waited almost 7 months. this charge on my account and my pre-approval to follow few days later was just a coincidence…
Wow, no incremental updates on approvals since Nov 15 submissions (which came through on May 18). This process has been frustrating to say the least and it helps that I am not in any tearing hurry 
It looks like they have stop processing preapprovals after 18 May 2022.
Exactly! Else the way it was progressing at the beginning of May, by now all Nov 21 applications should have received pre-approvals.
Some previous comments indicate that there were early Dec applications that have been pre-approved.
That’s what my lawyers said, but I haven’t seen any in this forum.
See below an extract of their email:
On this note and since our last communication, we have received several pre approvals for clients submitted in 2021 (as these work basically on a logic of a queue, we are now receiving pre-approvals regarding submissions filed in the beginning of the month of December 2021). Our expectation is that we will be able to get all pre approvals from visas filed in December 2021 until the end of June 2022, moment where the applicants will be in a position to schedule their appointment for the collection of biometrics.
It seems foolhardy to assume everyone or even a reasonably large sample size of applicants are on this forum
A lot of applicants do not really speak English.
But at least we know some some applicants in this group are there who have applied on 29th Nov 2021 and are still awaiting Pre-approval.
So, it’s not likely that SEF have yet given any pre-approval for Dec '21 applicant.
True. And it is also possible that SEF is not pre-approving strictly following the timely basis.
Yes, that’s very much true too.
And then you have these articles…
Commercial real estate sales bolstering golden visas program - The Portugal News
I submitted Nov 15th, haven’t received preapproval yet. My lawyer said two weeks ago they thought I was going to get it very soon-I’ll post any updates I receive!
Have courage! But this is really not encouraging news…however, you will get in the first lot of next batch. All the best.
My lawyers are saying they are seeing approvals coming through even for December 2021 applicants.
I saw in the time line some applications received approval on 3 June 2022, maybe preapprovals have started moving.
Portugal Golden Visa Application Timeline Database - Google Sheets
Okay, so I got this from my lawyers. Either a document was missing or SEF did the “request for more info” thing that USCIS does to buy more time:
“ Dear Kari,
Thank you for your e-mail.
We´ve received request from SEF to add one more document (and we´ve already complied with this notification), so we expect to receive your pré-approval very soon. I´ll keep you informed.
Best regards / Cumprimentos,”
You should ask what they requested and when.
I did already, awaiting a response. It would’ve happened within the last two weeks though, because the would have told me the last time we emailed (which was two weeks ago).