The government debt agency said the yield in Tuesday’s sale of three-month Treasury bills was 4.926 percent.
That was up from 4.863 percent on the same bills in mid-June but lower than the record 4.967 percent on June 1.
Ratings agency Moody’s downgraded Portugal’s government debt by four notches on Tuesday, saying the country will likely need more financial aid.
Portugal took a 78 billion euros ($112 billion) bailout from its European partners and the International Monetary Fund earlier this year after investors began charging it unsustainably high interest on loans as they deemed the country a high risk.
The European Commission criticized Moody’s credit agency for downgrading Portugal’s debt to junk status, saying the “questionable” decision contradicted the EU’s own assessments.
“The timing of Moody’s decision is not only questionable but also based on absolutely hypothetical scenarios which are not in line at all with the economic program” adopted by Lisbon, said Amadeu Altafaj, commission spokesman for economic affairs.
“This is an unfortunate episode and raises once more the issue of the appropriateness of behavior of credit agencies and of their so-called clairvoyance,” said.
“I deeply regret the decision of one rating agency to downgrade the Portugese sovereign debt, and I regret it most in terms of its timing and magnitude,” said European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso.
The agency’s remarks “do not provide for more clarity, they rather add another speculative element to the situation,” he told reporters at the European parliament in Strasbourg.
