The allegations of the assistants in the instructive debate on the BES/GES process ended this Thursday with the representative of Carlos Malveiro telling how this businessman was allegedly misled by the account manager, who filed a complaint before the resolution.
In the court of Monsanto, lawyer Ricardo Sá Fernandes pointed out that this entrepreneur in the distribution sector lost 21 million euros (ME).
“The savings of your life,” described the lawyer, who defended the verdict before the verdict of the manager Paulo Monteiro, who was appointed as the defendant after the prosecution of the Public Prosecution Service (MP) and to whom Carlos Malveiro and the companies Totalvalue and Segouvier a crime of mockery.
“My assistants are one of the first to intervene in this process, they filed a complaint on July 21, 2014, BES had not yet been resolved. In addition to the mistrust they had in the management of BES, there was the circumstance that for years [Carlos Malveiro] complained about submitted applications and that in 2014 he discovered that he had been misled by his account manager”he said.
According to Ricardo Sá Fernandes, at the beginning of the previous decade, his client feared national economic and financial instability and wanted to invest his savings only in term deposits, leaving written instructions to that effect.
In May 2011, he was surprised to see that the statement referred to a fiduciary investment with Espírito Santo International (ESI) instead of a term deposit, and questioned the account manager about the situation.
“Defendant Paulo Monteiro replies that in the Swiss banking model the term deposit designation is not used, which is equivalent to a financial investment. This is a lie. Therefore, before all injured parties, he is filing a complaint. As the lie has a short leg, at the end of the statement, [o arguido Paulo Monteiro] said there were no term deposits at ESI because ESI was not a bank and could not receive term deposits”he stressed.
Since it was “obvious that Carlos Malveiro had been misled” by the account manager, who would have led him to believe that that money was invested in time deposits, the businessman’s representative even admitted that Paulo Monteiro might have thought the money would be safe, but that he couldn’t ignore that he cheated the customer. He then left criticism of the MP’s performance for defending the archiving of these facts.
“It’s a case of fraud absolutely ‘off the table’. The fact that the MP says no, because it concerns his strategy, is disappointing. In this case, pure and simple, the behavior of the Member of Parliament towards Mr Carlos Malveiro is deplorable. He felt cheated,” concluded the lawyer, who expressed the expectation that this situation will come to court.
The morning of the instructive debate ended with the allegations of the defense of two defendants: João Alexandre Silva, former head of BES in Madeira accused of two offenses of document forgery, and Pedro Costa, former director of the disintermediation area and BES Vida Credit , which attributed to her the crimes of passive corruption, disloyalty, fraud, money laundering and market manipulation.
For the lawyer Artur Marques, representing João Alexandre Silva, the “accusation is condemned to falter”, defending that his client was not questioned about the facts of which he was accused by the MP. Pedro Costa’s representative, Paulo Amil, pointed out errors to the prosecution, underlining that, in terms of facts and crimes, “there are situations where Pedro Costa is put there without knowing why”.
The hearing continues in the afternoon with the charges of the defense of the defendants Isabel Almeida, Paulo Nacif Jorge and Francisco Machado da Cruz.
This case is considered one of the largest cases in the history of the Portuguese judiciary and adds 242 investigations to the main proceedings, which have been merged, and complaints from more than 300 natural and legal persons, resident in Portugal and abroad.
According to the MP, whose accusation runs to some four thousand pages, the collapse of the Espírito Santo Group (GES) in 2014 will have caused damage of more than 11.8 billion euros.
Source: DN
