The defense of the injured parties of BES affirmed this Tuesday that Portuguese justice must “attribute to each person what is theirs”, remembering that there are “many people in need of money, because they have no way to survive.”
“Portuguese justice has to innovate and has to act like other legal systems. I have to […] assign to each one what is theirs,” said Nuno Silva Vieira at the door of the court, at the Justice Campus, in Lisbon, where the trial of the largest case in the Universe of Espírito Santo began this Tuesday.
The lawyer who represents some 2,000 injured people explained that, in terms of material damage, the average loss is around 200,000 euros.
“The average of 2,000 is around 200 thousand eurosamounts that were deposited in Banco Espírito Santo and were lost, and we are talking about sick people. Recently there were sick people, people who are already talking to their grandchildren to continue this process and they simply want to receive what is theirs, what was taken from them,” he said.
Before journalists, Nuno Silva Vieira considered that “there could have been provisional repairs.”
“We have a lot of people who need money because there is no way to survive.. There are people, particularly in Venezuela, which I represent, who don’t even have the money for legal representation, much less to qualify as heirs when someone dies. It is not demagogic on my part. “These are facts that we have to face,” he highlighted.
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 GES will have caused losses of more than 11.8 billion euros.
Source: Observadora
