This Tuesday, the Leiria Court acquitted the three defendants in the Cashball sports corruption case, since the crimes they were accused of had not been proven during the trial.
The Public Ministry (MP) accused sports businessmen Paulo Silva and João Gonçalves and former Sporting official Gonçalo Rodrigues of active corruption crimes, which involved two handball referees from Leiria, in the process that was renamed Cashball.
Paulo Silva was accused of three crimes of active corruption, two of them in the aggravated form. João Gonçalves and Gonçalo Rodrigues were also responsible for committing a crime of aggravated active corruption in relation to Ivan Caçador.
During the reading of the ruling, the judge presiding over the case stated that the defendants remained silent during the trial, so the statements “before the criminal investigation judge cannot be evaluated or used to incriminate the defendants.”
“The confession alone, without contradiction in court, has limited capacity to uncover the truth. The arbitrators said they received no value. Most of the communication files delivered by Paulo Silva were editable, so the collective court “understood that there are no technical conditions for the court to safely rely on these communications.”
According to the president of the court, the accused “will be acquitted, because the evidence legally presented at the hearing was not, in the opinion of this court, sufficient to issue a contrary decision.”
“The determining factor in this result was the procedural position of Paulo Silva, who within his rights chose to remain silent,” he added.
At the end of the ruling, Carlos Macanjo, João Gonçalves’ lawyer, stated that this “certainly was not the decision that many people expected,” but “it was the decision that justice made.”
The lawyer explained that his constituent’s silence was a decision made “in terms of strategy.” “If someone has to point out errors here, we can point them out to the investigation,” he concluded.
“It is a great pleasure to work with a judge of this type who, instead of deciding, as is sometimes said, according to conscience, decides according to the law and thus true justice is done and here justice was done,” he began by telling her. to journalists Carlos Melo Alves.
Paulo Silva’s defender added that “it does not mean that it was a citizen’s justice,” but rather “according to what the law says.”
For Carlos Melo Alves, they may have been “strategic errors by many people, errors in the investigation and, perhaps, errors in the defenses.”
“Whoever has more than 30 years of experience as a lawyer, what he concludes from a process like this, which I concluded many years ago, is that the evidence can never be based exclusively on the accused. The evidence of the accused is flexible: so much goes for one side and the other, as we saw here. The investigation should have known that the evidence based on the statements of the accused is volatile,” he concluded.
According to the MP’s order to which Lusa had access, the cashball process began with a complaint to the Department of Investigation and Criminal Action (DIAP) of Porto, when sports businessman Paulo Silva, in March 2018, reported that he had been approached by a football agent friend – João Geraldes – so that, together with the referees assigned to the handball matches of the national championship, it would benefit Sporting.
The judges in question are Ivan Caçador and Roberto Martins, belonging to the Leiria Handball Association and who, according to the MP, have not been proven to have accepted the alleged bribe.
Source: TSF
