Organizational Model - External Auditors

During the 2005 financial year, Banco Comercial Português and/or corporate persons in a controlling or group relation with it, contracted the services of KPMG (Portugal and abroad) to act as its Auditor and whose fees totalled Euro 7.426.000.

With a view to protecting the independence of the Auditor, and in the light of good practice and national and international standards, namely the "Sarbanes-Oxley Act", the Bank's Audit Commission and KPMG approved a set of regulatory principles described in the following text:

• KPMG and companies and corporate pesons belonging to the same network may not provide services to the Bank of Group, which are prohibited according to paragraph 201 of the "Sarbanes-Oxley Act";
• The hiring of the remaining non-prohibited services by any of the Bank's business Units or subsidiaries requires the prior approval of the Bank's Auditing Committee. This approval is granted for a pre-defined list of services for a renewable period of 12 months. For the remaining services, the specific approval of the Auditing Committee is required.

Additionally, KPMG has implemented on its intranet on an international level, a system called "Sentinel", which subjects the provision of services by any KPMG office to the authorisation of the Global Lead Partner responsible for the client. This procedure means that the KPMG office from whom services are requested must obtain previous authorisation from the Global Lead Partner. This request must contain the grounds for the work requested, particularly those factors which allow the evaluation of compliance with the applicable Risk Management rules, and consequently the independence of KPMG.

The Global Lead Partner also has the responsibility of verifying that the proposed services presented through Sentinel comply with the rules of pre-approval, and when required, take the necessary steps, in conjunction with the Auditing Committee, to ensure strict compliance with the applicable rules of independence.

All the above-mentioned procedures are subject to conformity tests carried out yearly by KPMG within the scope of Quality Control.