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Portugal’s former Economy Minister Manuel Pinho claimed on Thursday that the court in the EDP case convicted him in the trial‘on the basis of convictions’ , ignoring the testimony of witnesses and in order to avoid an ‘earthquake of justice’.
Manuel Pinho was speaking outside the court after being sentenced to 10 years in prison for passive corruption for an illegal act, money laundering and tax fraud, in a case in which former banker Ricardo Salgado (six years and three months in prison) and the minister’s wife, Alexandra Pinho, were also sentenced to four years and eight months in prison, with a suspended sentence.
‘What happened here (in the trial) has absolutely nothing to do with the sentence,’ according to the former minister in José Sócrates’ government, justifying that the court chose to sentence him for one reason: “To avoid an earthquake in the justice system.”
In Manuel Pinho’s opinion, it would be very complicated for the courts to acquit him in a case whose inquiry was opened in 2012 and in which he has been under house arrest for almost two and a half years.
The former minister considered that the court made a decision that ignored what the 120 witnesses said at the trial, emphasising that ‘there wasn’t a single witness who supported the prosecution’s thesis’.
‘I’m absolutely certain that after the appeals, they will come to the conclusion that I didn’t commit any crime,’ said Manuel Pinho, also criticising the court for believing in indirect evidence. He also lamented the fact that ‘trials are a lottery, not based on evidence produced’ in court.
Ricardo Sá Fernandes, Manuel Pinho’s lawyer, told journalists that he had ‘already lodged an appeal’ against the 10-year prison sentence, which, he said, ‘is obviously a very heavy sentence’.
“The court referred to a virtual reality. It based this conviction on presumptions that were poorly drawn, poorly conceived and that result from the prejudices with which this issue is approached,’ criticised the lawyer, considering that in the face of such a “bad and poorly constructed sentence”, perhaps this will “facilitate the defence’s appeal” to the Lisbon Court of Appeal.
‘I believe that if we’re lucky at the Court of Appeal and the case is distributed to someone who looks at and evaluates (the facts), we can reverse the decision,’ said Ricardo Sá Fernandes, claiming to be ‘confident that we can turn this negative result around at half-time’.
The lawyer reiterated that Manuel Pinho ‘was not corrupted’ and that the court’s decision is ‘exemplarily bad because it is poorly founded’.
‘This is not what the fight against corruption is about,’ emphasised Ricardo Sá Fernandes, claiming that justice cannot be turned into a game in which ‘prejudices win’.
The court proved the existence of a corruptive pact between Manuel Pinho and Ricardo Salgado to defend and promote the interests of the Espírito Santo Group (GES) while the former was in government between 2005 and 2009.
In an abridged reading of the 700-page judgement, the presiding judge also stressed that Manuel Pinho and Alexandra Pinho received around €4.9 million as part of the quid pro quo established in this agreement.
‘The defendant Manuel Pinho also knew that by accepting pecuniary advantages that were not his due, he was trading in public office, jeopardising public trust,’ said the judge, emphasising that Ricardo Salgado and Manuel Pinho ‘knew that they were damaging the image of the Republic and undermining public trust’ with their conduct.
Ana Paula Rosa also considered Manuel Pinho’s statements in court to explain the situations attributed to him by the prosecution to be ‘untrue, incoherent and illogical’.
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