Portugal Supreme Court rules termination of Interest Rate Swap Agreement based on change in circumstances due to the drop in interest rates in the financial crisis

The issue of change in circumstances has been widely discussed by Portuguese legal authors and jurisprudence, however, the cases in which this legal institute has been successfully argued before a Portuguese court are sparse. In spite of this, it is commonly accepted that changes in circumstances such as an abrupt or excessive devaluation of a currency or the unexpected rise in the price or quotation of a commodity used in the manufacture of a certain product may trigger the applicability of the legal institute of change in circumstances, as opposed to changes resulting from political events, which have been consistently excluded from its scope by the courts…