MP wants to ban the two lawyers who helped Berardo circumvent banks

The Public Prosecution Service wants the two lawyers accused of, using an anonymous citizen, to have helped businessman Joe Berardo circumvent three national banks, to be prohibited from law for at least three years.

According to the prosecution deducted Wednesday by the Public Prosecution Service, and to which Lusa had access, the prosecutors responsible for the case of the Berardo case asked to be urgently communicated to the Bar that two of the defendants in this case be communicated, ANDRÉ LUÍS GOMES e GONÇALO MOREIRA RATOthey are lawyers “and the facts that are susceptible to integrating disciplinary infractions”.

Joe berardothe two lawyers and the Berardo Collection Association are accused that it has prevented three national banks – Caixa Geral de Depósitos, the extinct Banco Espírito Santo and the Portuguese Commercial Bank – to claim credits worth a billion euros.

For the Public Prosecution Service, the lawyer André Luís Gomes agreed to simulate the existence of a litigation, “I well knew not to be real“, Presenting to the court” procedural pieces that did not reflect the truth. “

On the other hand, Gonçalo Moreira Rato will have agreed to establish the action Civil “Although well known that he had never even seen or communicated with his alleged client,” reads the prosecution.

“Both manifestly advocated against lawthey resorted to illegal expedients, assumed unjust sponsorships and aimed at obtaining illicit results, ”added the prosecutor regarding the process that resulted from the extraction of a CGD process certificate.

The Public Prosecution Service believes that the defendants removed all protections Credit banks’ interests, eliminating control and intervention mechanisms in the Berardo Collection Association – defendant society – which had been agreed in 2008, the year the three creditors began to stop 100% of the Berardo Collection Association’s participation titles.

To nullify this control, which extended to works of art, whose value exceeded the 316 million eurosa “previously outlined plan” was executed to achieve the nullity of the statutory changes in force within the 2008 attachment. Such a plan will have begun in 2013, and later the defendants achieved gradually empties the power of the three banks creditors.

In 2016, after the court’s decision, banks’ titles went to 49.81%, as opposed to 100% of the first agreement. The goal would be to “put this Heritage Out of the reach of credit banks”It reads in the accusation order.

According to the MP, the sentence of the civil action “allowed the defendants to approve deliberations at general assemblies of the Association Berardo Collection injury to the equity interests of the credit banks and contrary to the agreed in the negotiations and contracts celebrated between 2008 and 2010”.

Under the main proceedings, the CGD case, on June 29, 2021 and heard by the then Judge Carlos Alexandre in the first judicial interrogation, which applied it as a coercion measure of five million euros.

The process with – a list that includes Berardo’s son – investigates suspicions of various crimes, namely qualified scams, money laundering and qualified tax fraud.

Joe Berardo was indicted of eight qualified burla crimescapital whites, qualified tax fraud, two qualified confidence abuse crimes and a crime of misleading, having been forced to provide a mark of five million euros and not to leave the country, among other coercion measures.