The Court of Aveiro sentenced this Thursday to six years in prison a financial adviser involved in a gold business scam that injured dozens of people, punishing a former university student who collaborated in the plot with a suspended sentence.
During the summary reading of the sentence, the president of the court said that the Court found 29 of the 37 crimes of qualified fraud of which the defendants were accused.
The defendants were thus acquitted of eight crimes of fraud, since the group of judges understood that, in these cases, the proven facts “do not allow criminal responsibility”, or because the victims know and know “the way in which the ” cunning scheme established”, or because they rejected the proposal.
The most serious sanction fell on the intellectual author of the plot, a 52-year-old financial adviser, who was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison for each of the crimes, having received a single sentence of six years in prison, in legal basis regime.
The former student of the University of Aveiro, who confessed to having invited a “dozen” of friends, relatives and colleagues to enter a business allegedly linked to the gold sector, was sentenced to two years and three months for each of the crimes.
In legal terms, he was given a single sentence of four and a half years in prison, suspended for the same period of time, on the condition that the defendant pay 4,500 euros to the Florinhas do Vouga association.
In this case, the group of judges took into account the age of the accused when the acts were committed.
The events took place between the end of 2013 and August 2014.
According to the prosecutor’s office of the Public Ministry (MP), the two defendants defrauded some 40 people, appropriating almost 20 thousand euros, through a scheme commonly known as a “pyramid scheme”.
According to the investigation, the two defendants attracted clients, convincing them to make an investment in a company for amounts that usually range between three hundred euros and one thousand euros.
In a few months, each of these investors would receive this amount plus an amount about five or six times the amount invested, but they never got any return, losing all the money invested.
Source: Observadora
