Ex-BES boss handed 8 years custodial sentence

Ricardo Salgado, he former banker who headed Banco Espírito Santo and was instrumental in its eventual collapse in 2014, has been served with an eight year prison sentence for abuse of trust. His defence will appeal.

A medical report requested by the banker’s defence team was rejected by the court which sentenced him for three crimes of abuse of trust.
The judges partially agreed with Portugal’s public prosecution serve (Ministério Público) which had called for a stiffer prison sentence because of Operation Marquês. The reasoning behind the final decision ran to 700 pages.
Operation Marques was a mega corruption case that involved convoluted financial scandals at BES/GES and PT Telecom and had over 4,000 pages of evidence and 600 appendixes. For the first time in Portuguese legal history a prime minister (José Sócrates) was imprisoned (He is now living in Brazil) and charged with 31 crimes of corruption, tax fraud, falsifying documents and money laundering.
Ricardo Salgado’s defence called the sentence decided by the Court of Appeals “an attack on human dignity, including the dignity of Ricardo Salgado (but not just)” and also the “fundamental principles of our system of democratic justice”.
In 2022 Ricardo Salgado was handed a six year prison sentence. In that decision the judges led by Francisco Henriques referred to Salgado suffering from Alzheimer’s but it was not mentioned again in the sentence handed down last week.

Image: Lusa – Manuel de Almeida