Man, 6/21 was literally the date I have been telling my lawyers to grab me since I submitted my application. Life is not so good : <
Can you kindly dig up one or two of these? I follow a few sites but somehow never came across this topicā¦
Well, if thatās the case, at least thereās light at the end of the tunnel and some transparency from SEF.
ted.
here is the source of my info, the Minister for Interior Administration.
Minister for Interior Administration Eduardo Cabrita admitted in parliament last month that SEFās appointment system was showing an āillegitimate appropriation of online appointmentsā. He said the system was āin revisionā, but that āerroneous practices overwhelmingly by some law officesā had already been identified.
At the time SEF told Lusa that all appointments for immigrants with residency applications were ācompletely full until October 30ā. There is no provision for the opening of any new ones, the agency said.
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Thanks. Letās hope for the best!
Update from my lawyers:
āThis is a message to everyone who invested in the real estate late 2020 and till now did not get the appointment. SEF does not offer now the slots in regular mode, but sometimes there are cancellations from other applicants and these can be caught. Usually the time frame between getting such appointment and its date is no more than 24 hours and the slots are for 1-2 people.
Also in August SEF goes on vacation for the whole month and only restarts in September in normal mode (?). We suggest that those of you who can - comes to Portugal for 2-3 weeks in September in hope to catch cancellations.ā
Very promising, considering that weāre a family of fourā¦
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Yeahā¦ especially, when there are over 223,000 applicants with pending cases with SEF.
Do you / anyone know how many are GV applicants?
Sure. I am imagining 100 people show up in Portugal but only 2 slots open up in September. At the very least, we could all get together and join the protest in the streetsā¦
I doubt anyone knows except SEF. Based on previous years analysis and some basic deduction, it is a number in the thousands ā¦probably 2000-3000 GVs)
My rough math: say there are only 15 SEF locations that does GV and they only take 6 slots a day. And they only work 1/2 of the year (150 days).
So whenever they do open up slots and operate, they should be able to take in 13,500 biometrics appointments.
Each applicant usually has 2-4 applicants so say 3 on average. Thatās 4,500 families that should clear in a yearā¦
If there are just 3K GV applicants in the queue then we are good; if this turns out to be a lot higher then LOL.
(My assumed numbers are ridiculous in most countries like the US but not so much for PT I guess now)
There are 10 SEF offices processing ARI applications, according to the SEF appointment scheduling site:
- Posto SEF CNAI-Porto
- DirecĆ§Ć£o Regional do Centro
- DelegaĆ§Ć£o da Guarda
- Dir. Regional de Lisboa, Vale do Tejo e Alentejo
- Loja do CidadĆ£o de Faro - SEF
- DelegaĆ§Ć£o de Albufeira
- DelegaĆ§Ć£o de PortimĆ£o
- DelegaĆ§Ć£o de Tavira
- Loja do CidadĆ£o da Madeira - SEF
- DirecĆ§Ć£o Regional dos AƧores
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My lawyer submitted the ARI (GV) application in Jan 2021. I was given access to the ARI application portal, and it has been 6 months since. I was told there are no appointments available for fairly sometime.
Having accepted th above, the new intrigue is:
I see that many of you have mentioned a āpre-approvalā for your applications; how exactly is this approval reflected on the ARI portal? I donāt see anywhere in this portal where it says you are āpre-approvedā, just a āprocess numberā. Am I missing something? I would be grateful if anyone can shed some light on this. Cheers
Hi Nevada
(It seems this will take forever.)
I see you have also access to your ARI portal on SEF. I have been reading threads on the topic of scheduling prints, and I am wondering how do I know if I am āpre-approvedā. It has been 6 mths since application, and my lawyer doesnāt seem to be keen on answering that quesiton or anything about the SEF the Portal, not to mention the last appointsments anywhere. They just tell you wait (forever).
I am having a very very bad frustrating experience with all this, after having payed all the fees up front and completing all the necessary investments in under 30 days. Maybe I am expecting too much? Where I live everything (including bureacracy) is highly efficient ā¦
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Once you log in, when youāre on the main application page, check the āStatus of the applicationā line:
https://ari.sef.pt/ARIApplication.aspx
Also, I received an email message from SEF confirming pre-approval, with the subject āARI - NotificaĆ§Ć£o de AceitaĆ§Ć£oā
Sympathies for your uncooperative lawyer. I donāt have any ideas; that would be really frustrating. If it makes you feel any better, everything seems to be completely stalled for everyone, and the occasional trickle of last-minute appointments has completely vanished for almost two weeks. I fear that my August trip to Portugal is not likely to be productive or enjoyable.
clearly, you have a very long period of adjustment in front of you. 
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Hi Nevada
Thanks for the screenshot. It seems my problem is now more dire than I had expected. After seeing your reply (screenshot), I went back to the portal. It now has changed from āawaiting for analysisā to āawaiting for submissionā. Has this portal application reverted to never having been submittedā¦ ā¦ ?
This is fully mind blowing after 6 months of application. Iām totally lost.
Well. It seems my ARI portal has imploded on me. I feel my application has been mis-handled ā¦
Thatās not good!
My best (but wild) guess is that SEF found some problem with the submission and bumped it back into the unsubmitted state. It seems like a good time to check with your lawyers and get things back in motion. I cringe at the possibility that you may have to run a new background check and get that apostilled, since I think it has to be valid as of the submission date.
Aside: I requested a new background check last month and plan to keep requesting them every 6 weeks on a rolling basis so that I always have a current, apostilled check in hand whenever my biometrics appointment comes to pass. Iāve waited long enough; I donāt want to incur any preventable delays.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that your glitch probably doesnāt affect your timeline in the least, as long as your application gets approved before they start accepting appointments againāsupposedly in November but who knows? They donāt seem to give any priority to people who have been waiting a long time vs. people who were just approved yesterday.
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I agree with Nevada. Seems like your application was submitted by your lawyers, then analyzed by SEF which obviously took some time, and then was pushed back for re-submission.
If I were you, I would check for the option of dumping your current lawyers and re-registering yourself on SEF portal to handle your own re-submission. I donāt know if itās technically possible with SEF, knowing that you have been already registered via lawyers.
You may try calling SEF support line from within Portugal or ask someone to call them if you are not in Portugal yourself as their telephone lines are inaccessible from outside Portugal.
Here is something to consider. In my case, I have no access to the portal and I get no notices from SEF directly. Is it possible that your lawyers are not registered on the portal so they do not get notifications about your status? Since you are the āregistered userā, you should be getting notices from SEF, not your lawyers. I donāt know how it works, so I am only speculating why this could have occurred because it seems inexcusable that your lawyers would not follow up on this situation if they were aware.
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