Follow our liveblog here where we follow the start of the trial in the BES/GES case
Representatives of the victims of Banco Espírito Santo protest this Tuesday at the Justice Campus, in Lisbon, with a hearse where they placed a photograph of Ricardo Salgadothe day the trial for the BES case began.
In addition to the photograph, on the same hearse, used as a form of protest, you can read: “They killed our savings, now is the time for justice.”
The demonstration began at 8:30 a.m. and behind the van there were 16 people dressed in black, with their faces covered and with their names of BES victims who have died printed on t-shirts.
In front of the Justice Campus, but on the other side of the road, banners were placed with other written messages such as “Novo Banco injured” or “we demand provision.”
In statements to the Lusa agency, the president of the Association for the Defense of Banking Clients (ABESD), Francisco Carvalho, stated that the symbolism of the initiative is “to draw attention to the 1,900 victims “That didn’t have any kind of solution.”
“They are victims who lost their life savings, because they believed in two entities, the Banco Espírito Santo entity and the Portuguese State, in which Portugal was one of the safe countries to make their savings, their investments, their deposits. […] And the State could not guarantee this good supervision and Banco Espírito Santo committed one of the biggest crimes in Portuguese financial history,” he stated.
According to Francisco Carvalho, the trial that begins this Tuesday “is the resurgence of hope.”
“We believe that justice may be slow, but it is profound. We firmly believe in Portuguese justice. We believe in this court, in any court, we are comfortable, but we cannot stop showing our presence, using the presence of journalists as mediators between the victims, civil society and the country, because this is unrepeatable. “This started 14 years ago, when there was a perfectly rotten institution and no one knew it,” he stated.
The trial of the BES/GES case was scheduled for 9:30 a.m. this Tuesday, after having started approximately half an hour later, at the Central Criminal Court of Lisbon10 years after the collapse of the Espírito Santo Group (GES), in a case with more than 300 crimes and 18 defendants, including former banker Ricardo Salgado.
The former president of the BES, Ricardo Salgado, is the main defendant in the BES/GES case and is responsible before the courts for 62 crimes, allegedly committed between 2009 and 2014.
Among the crimes charged are one of criminal association, 12 of active corruption in the private sector, 29 of qualified fraud, five of infidelity, one of market manipulation, seven of money laundering and seven of document falsification.
In addition to Ricardo Salgado, 17 other defendants are also being tried, namely Amílcar Morais Pires, Manuel Espírito Santo Silva, Isabel Almeida, Machado da Cruz, António Soares, Paulo Ferreira, Pedro Almeida Costa, Cláudia Boal Faria, Nuno Escudeiro, João Martins Pereira, Etienne Cadosch, Michel Creton, Pedro Serra and Pedro Pinto, in addition to the companies Rio Forte Investments, Espírito Santo Irmãos, SGPS and Eurofin.
According to the Public Ministry, the collapse of the GES will have caused losses greater than 11.8 billion euros.
Source: Observadora
