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Judge Ivo Rosa has eight months to complete the criminal investigation phase of the Universo Espírito Santo case. The decision is made by the Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSM), which means that Rosa has to produce a decision to pronounce or not to pronounce before February 1, 2023.

The BES, which is auxiliary in the process, had asked the CSM to classify the respective cases as urgent (after Judge Ivo Rosa rejected an identical request). The CSM did not decree urgency but imposed a deadline on the judge to finish the work.

“The request for procedural acceleration of process 324/14 was partially granted, and the CSM set a period of eight months from the notification of this resolution for the instruction phase to be completed,” an official CSM source confirmed to the Observer.

BES case. MP and BES seek to accelerate the investigation phase of the Universo Espírito Santo case due to “serious risk of prescription”

According to the same source, the plenary session of the Council considered that eight months “is the term considered adequate, since the legal term of four months is clearly insufficient given the complexity and dimension of the process.” All to also avoid the risk of prescription of some crimes.

Judge Ivo Rosa himself has already recognized, as the Observer advanced, that “taking into account the date of the presumed consummation of the crimes of forgery of documents and infidelity” the “prescription of the criminal action regarding the aforementioned crimes” and against to various defendants “will take place between August 7, 2024 and March 28, 2025.”

On the other hand, the lawyers Paulo Sá e Cunha and Miguel Pereira Coutinho objected that Judge Ivo Rosa is transforming the criminal investigation stage “into a supposed variant” of anticipation “of the trial stage”, which makes the victims risk not “obtaining any substantive judicial decision in good time.”

Ivo Rosa said that the decision belongs to the courts – not to the judges’ management body

After admitting the request of the BES, Judge Ivo Rosa described it as “manifestly inadmissible insofar as the process is not delayed, the process is not stopped and the intended purposes do not fall within the scope of procedural acceleration.”

In his order, the investigating judge also says that the declaration of urgency “is an act within the jurisdiction of the courts, in fact, already the subject of a decision in these proceedings, and the measures suggested by the Assistant refer to the allocation of more means to the court”. In other words, Ivo Rosa implies that it is a jurisdictional matter, so the judges’ management body will not have the power to decide on it.

Deputy and assistant BES challenge usefulness of testimony of Passos Coelho and Carlos Costa

Be that as it may, Ivo Rosa refused to accept classifying the case as urgent because “other equally fundamental values ​​of a rule of law can never be put in crisis”, such as “defense guarantees”, among other values. Thus, the judge did not see “any advantage” in the proceedings taking place during judicial vacations.

We will see how judge Ivo Rosa will react to this decision of the CSM, which in addition to being the governing body of the judiciary, also has disciplinary powers. In fact, Ivo Rosa is in the crosshairs of an ongoing disciplinary process.