Rodrigo Antunes / Lusa
José Sócrates on the way out of the campus
The former prime minister guarantees that he never arrived to dinner with Ricardo Salgado in 2014, although his own ears indicate the opposite. Socrates also states that he did not benefit the Lena Group in the case of TGV.
The Public Prosecution Service (MP) confronted José Sócrates, in court, with ears in which he combined a dinner in 2014 at the home of former banker Ricardo Salgado, with the former insisting Prime Minister who This meal never happened.
In the telephone interceptions dated April 2014 and reproduced in the judgment of Operation Marquis, the former Prime Minister (2005-2011) accepts, through his secretary, dinner at Ricardo Salgado’s house in Cascais, in a meeting for which the then President of Portugal Telecom (PT), Henrique Granadeiro, was also invited.
Asked by prosecutor Rómulo Mateus, the former governor rejected that he remained several hours at Salgado’s residence in Cascais, the night he admits that he offered him a book. The MP presented geolocation records of the mobile phone that would put it in the area for four hours, but Socrates insisted that was only half an hour at the banker house And then he went to another nearby housing, whose fate declined to be revealed because it considered it to be “private life.” Annoyed by the insistence on this point, he argued that Salgado maintained political connections on the right, namely the funding of the Cavaco Silva campaign, not to the PS.
“I was invited to dinner, but dinner did not happen, and I am convinced that it did not happen precisely because Dr. Henrique Granadeiro did not appear“José Sócrates reiterated, devaluing the fact that, the day after the scheduled date, he was heard to say that the meal at home of the President of Banco Espírito Santo (BES) had occurred.
Lena Group “didn’t win anything” with TGV
The TGV theme was also addressed, in particular by the contract signed in 2010 for the Poceirão-Caia section. The MP maintains that the reformulation of the agreement benefited the ELOS consortium, which included the Lena Group, near Socrates. The defendant acknowledged that he introduced a Swaps clause, but ensured that such did not imply any improper advantage.
On the contrary, Socrates accused the Government of Passos Coelho of deliberately removed the amount of the State Budget project, which precluded the Court of Audit visa in 2012.It was a scam sold to the Portuguese”He said, arguing that the executive tried to transfer responsibilities to the institution.
Socrates also stressed that the consortium had a guaranteed bank financing of 600 million euros, associated with four swaps that eventually generated losses of more than 300 million, paid largely by banks and not by the state. “The Lena Group won nothing”He insisted, remembering that in 2018 the company recorded negative results.
The former prime minister omitted, however, that the Elos consortium even complained 300 million euros of compensationamount that was reduced in an arbitral tribunal to 149.6 million in 2016. This compensation was never paid, as the State challenged the court decision.
Unfolding in numbers, Socrates stressed that most of the amount attributed corresponded to costs paid to third parties, being Only eight million referring to internal costs. “The only thing rejected was to compensate for the consortium for normal application expenses,” he said.
José Sócrates, 67, is pronounced (accused after instruction) of 22 crimesincluding three corruption, because it allegedly received money to benefit from the Lena Group, the Espírito Santo Group (GES) – linked to BES, the PT’s shareholder date – and the Vale do Lobo venture in the Algarve.
Ricardo Salgado, 81 years old and sick from Alzheimer’s, and Henrique Granadeiro, of the same age, are others of the 21 defendants in the process.
The 21 defendants-who respond globally for 117 economic and financial crimes-have generally denied the practice of any illicit.
The trial began on July 3 at the Central Criminal Court of Lisbon and continues this Wednesday, with more requests for clarification from the MP, namely about José Sócrates’s list with the Lena Group.
