There is enough evidence for former prime minister José Sócrates and 21 other defendants in the Operation Marquis be tried for most of the 188 crimes they were accused of, including corruption, the Lisbon Court of Appeal decided this Thursday. A large part of the decision of the investigating judge Ivo Rosa, who, in April 2021, archived 171 crimes from the indictment, leaving only 17 standing, is thus rendered ineffective. The ruling is signed by judges Raquel Lima, Micaela Rodrigues and Madalena Caldeira.
Of the 28 defendants charged, Ivo Rosa had only sent five to trial: Sócrates, the former banker Ricardo Salgado, the businessman Carlos Santos Silva, the former socialist minister Armando Vara and the former driver of the former prime minister João Perna. Big names such as the former strongmen of Portugal Telecom, Henrique Granadeiro and Zeinal Bava, businessman Joaquim Barroca, from Grupo Lena, and Hélder Bataglia, the Portuguese-Angolan businessman who founded Escom, saw all the crimes attributed to them archived.
This Thursday, the Lisbon Court decided that almost everyone should be tried: Bava, Granadeiro, Barroca, Hélder Bataglia, Sócrates’ ex-wife, Sofia Fava, and several companies from the Lena Group, totaling 22 defendants. Former banker Ricardo Salgado is once again accused of corruption and money laundering, totaling, according to the Superior Council of the Judiciary, 11 crimes. Only five of the accused companies and the daughter of former socialist minister Bárbara Vara, to whom the Public Ministry accused two crimes of money laundering, will be left out of the trial.
Despite deciding to send 22 of the 28 defendants to trial, the judges closed crimes against 14 defendants. And they leave several criticisms of judge Ivo Rosa, who is also currently a judge at the Lisbon Court of Appeal.
The three crimes of passive corruption now attributed again to the former socialist leader — in addition to another 19 of money laundering and tax fraud — concern many other businesses: the financing of more than 200 million euros granted by Caixa Geral de Depósitos to resort of Vale do Lobo, promoted by a group of businessmen led by Helder Bataglia, the Espírito Santo group’s relations with Portugal Telecom and also the state projects for which the Lena group applied, such as the tender for the TGV. This Thursday, suspicions were validated that José Sócrates used the power he held to benefit these private sector businessmen, who bribed him.
The judges accuse the investigating judge of the Operation Marquis of having been too credulous, in dismissing the suspicions that José Sócrates received close to six million from the Lena group as payment for his intervention in the process of granting the first section of Alta Velocidade, between Poceirão and Caia: “Justifies the lack of evidence , regarding the existence of said payments, in the statements made by the defendant José Sócrates and in his interpretation of the documents relating to the trips to Venezuela (…). We confess that these conclusions from the judge denote a certain ‘candor/naivety’, as it is immediately evident that, in the case of illicit acts, the same [actos] they are not written in documents.”
And they say that the judge should have assessed the evidence presented to him by the Public Prosecutor’s Office as a whole, and not in a segmented way. “In this process, this requirement is even greater because the meanders and paths traced by the defendants, in terms of the accusation, are not linear, but tortuous, full of diversionary maneuvers”, write the judges. Even though they recognize his commitment to carrying out an exhaustive analysis of the material collected by the prosecutors in charge of the investigation, they also criticize him for having exceeded his duties: “It seems to us that at a certain point he strayed from the objective of the investigation and carried out typical steps of a true trial.”
Arrested on the night of November 21, 2014 at Lisbon airport while returning from Paris, the former socialist leader was then held in preventive detention, in the Évora prison, until September 4, when he returned home under house arrest, watched by the PSP. He was eventually released on October 16, 2015. The Public Ministry says that the life of luxury he led was made not with disinterested loans from his friend Carlos Santos Silva, also accused in the case, but with money from the “gloves” that he they were paid in exchange for the favors he did for those businessmen.
The case revolves around more than 34 million euros collected between 2006 and 2015, most of which was kept in accounts offshore in Switzerland controlled by the former prime minister’s friend Carlos Santos Silva. “We are certain that this value belonged to the defendant Sócrates”, says this Thursday’s ruling. Which highlights the carefree way in which he dealt with money: “he often lost track of what he was spending and was systematically unaware of the balance in his bank account, even using debit and/or credit cards without it being available. ceiling for this effect.” Not using the service homebanking, at a certain point “he stopped exercising any control over his expenses”. Between 2011 and 2014, his account at Caixa Geral de Depósitos supported expenses in excess of one million euros.
The judges were also not convinced that it was the mother of the former ruler who paid for his vacation paid in cash: “It is not clear that there are withdrawal operations in Maria Adelaide Monteiro’s bank accounts compatible” with the ten thousand euros with which José Sócrates told the authorities that he was in his pocket. “It’s not even reasonable, especially in these times, for someone to travel with large amounts of cash.” On the contrary, they believe there is no doubt that Ricardo Salgado made payments to the former leader of the PS: “The receipt of money seems obvious to us. There is a whole scheme set up (…)”. And Ivo Rosa is once again the subject of repair. “Obviously we are not going to find direct proof of the facts. We cannot understand the investigating judge’s astonishment when he says that nothing appears in the bank statements of the accused Sócrates”, states the ruling.