“The Portuguese government does not export legs of pork, not to Venezuela, or to any country in the world”, Augusto Santos Silva told reporters.

“Portugal is a market economy, the government does not participate in exports Portuguese companies arrange with foreign companies so there is no possibility of any political interference, much less any kind of sabotage by the Portuguese government”, he added.

The minister said he was looking into the situation and there did seem to have been “a commercial problem”, but the information he had was that the meat had been exported to Venezuela, but perhaps there had been a distribution problem within the country.

“As such, the question of whether the food was distributed in Venezuela, is a question for them to work out”, he said.

Santos Silva said there was no need to call the Venezuelan ambassador in Lisbon, since this was not a political question.

Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, accused Portugal of sabotaging his country’ import of pork legs, a traditional Christmas meal in that country.

Maduro said that Venezuela draw up an import plan and arranged the payments but the Portuguese “boats” that carried the pork “were pursued and sabotaged” and the bank accounts that were to be used for the payments were blocked.