“The company is not suspended, only the license has been suspended until the necessary clarifications have been provided,” said Mónica Faneco in a written response to questions asked by Lusa.

This decision by IMT, with which the person responsible disagrees, aims to ensure that “all doubts are duly clarified and that the operation is aligned with the legal requirements applicable to the sector”.

“Of course, we cannot agree with the decision taken by IMT, so, at this moment, we are in the working phase with IMT in order to dispel any and all doubts regarding the legality of this project”, she insisted.

Público newspaper reports, that the IMT questioned the legality of TVDE only for women because, according to the law in this sector, “there cannot be discrimination in the activity of individual and paid passenger transport”.

This public institute, responsible for analysing and registering TVDE platforms, operators and drivers, refers to the terms of article 7 of Law nº 45/2018, of August 10, on “non-discrimination”.

“Users, actual and potential, have equal access to TVDE services, and they cannot be refused by the provider for reasons, namely ancestry, age, sex”, says the law.

Mónica Faneco said she “remains committed” to collaborating with the competent authorities to resolve this situation quickly and transparently.

“Pinker is an innovative and differentiated concept in the Portuguese TVDE market, so it is very natural that it arouses a lot of curiosity, expectations and even doubts”, she highlighted.

At the beginning of the week, the project's founder revealed that Pinker, which aims to give women security by ordering a vehicle that will be driven exclusively by women, would become operational in the coming days.

The new electronic platform for transportation in unmarked vehicles assumes that the main difference compared to its competitors operating in Portugal, Uber and Bolt, is that it only accepts female drivers and is for the exclusive use of women.

“We want to bring security and confidence to women in our services, being an alternative to what already exists”, explained the businesswoman, refusing to qualify the service of applications already operating in terms of security.

Mónica Faneco also said that Pinker is already licensed both in Portugal and in Europe, and has “more than a thousand interested drivers”.

To date, six years after the entry into force of the law, published in the Diário da República in August 2018, which governs TVDE activity, there are two platforms working in Portugal: Uber and Bolt.