Lawyer Luísa Sá Gomes was sentenced in 2018 to two years and three months in prison for crimes of abuse of power, economic participation in business and forgery of documents. In the summer of 2022, the Minister of Agriculture appointed her Deputy Director General Veterinary.
The news is brought to the fore by the newspaper Público, which points out that in June 2021, the Lisbon Court of Appeal ordered the trial – involving multiple defendants – to be repeated because it understood mistakes had been made in the first trial.
That puts Luísa Sá Gomes back as a defendant, and it is in this situation that Maria do Céu Antunes nominated her for the position last June.
As that newspaper explains, since the lawyer was appointed on a replacement basis, her appointment did not go through the Recruitment and Selection Committee for Public Administration (CRESAP).
In the position of Deputy Director of the Directorate General of Veterinary Medicine, Luísa Sá Gomes can authorize expenditure on works and acquisition of goods and services up to a maximum of one hundred thousand euros at a time and decide whether to open public tenders or make direct adjustments.
The Public Prosecution Service accuses the lawyer of being an accomplice to João Correia, who was Director General of Infrastructure and Equipment of the Internal Administration who was charged with 32 crimes of passive corruption and nearly a million euros in damage to the state.
The judges’ verdict is now expected in June, as the retrial ended in March.
Luísa Sá Gomes’ lawyer told Público that if her client could be acquitted, nothing prevents her from exercising this position, under the constitutional principle of the presumption of innocence.
For his part, the former president of CRESAP believes that although the first conviction has been overturned, the truth is that it existed. And for this reason, João Bilhim believes that the government was politically and ethically prevented from appointing Luísa Sá Gomes to this position, not least because the suspicions have not yet been allayed.
Source: DN
