In May 205, senior executives from Yahoo, the US internet comapny, visited Madeira to discuss plans to run their European e-commerce business from there. Other global internet groups, including AOL and Apple’s iTunes, were negotiating similar deals.

Three days after the Yahoo visit, Portugal’s newly-elected Socialist government made a decision that caused the immediate collapse of these plans, which would have put Madeira definitively on the map as an international centre for e-commerce, created dozens of jobs for qualified professionals and generated hundreds of millions of euros in tax revenue.