- The collapse of the banking entity in August 2014 has caused damages of more than 11.8 billion euros
The trial for the collapse of Banco Espírito Santo (BES) in Portugal began on October 15, with its former president Ricardo Salgado as the main defendant, some 700 witnesses, more than 300 crimes to be tried and around 2,000 affected.
Clients of the Banco Espírito Santo subsidiary in Venezuela, and other countries, gathered at the headquarters of the Central Criminal Court in Lisbon to demand the return of their assets and savings.
One of those affected, Fátima Rufino, told the EFE news agency that her parents deposited their money in the bank because it was a “very renowned” entity and lost it after the intervention of the BES in August 2014.
Rufino pointed out that the BES deceived many Venezuelan families of Portuguese descent, mostly older adults who did not have the capacity to understand the risks of the products they were being offered.
“My parents had a checking account and my mother once wanted to withdraw the money to buy an apartment and they told her not to. That day they called my father to offer him a new product and he fell, they stole his savings,” Rufino told the EFE news agency.
Venezuelan Irene Gomes was another of those affected who appeared at the doors of the Portuguese court to demand the reimbursement of family savings. His father, a native of Madeira, had a fixed-term account at the BES with his brothers, in which they deposited a family inheritance of around 200 thousand euros.
Details of the trial against Banco Espírito Santo
The process against Banco Espírito Santo will judge more than 300 crimes related to the alleged falsification of the bank’s accounting. holding Espírito Santo Services between 2009 and 2014, which caused the collapse of the entity.
The president of the Association for the Defense of Banking Clients (ABESD), Francisco Carvalho, demands 330 million euros for those affected.
The ABESD spokesperson, one of the 700 witnesses in the process, stressed that the bank never offered any solution and that the different governments where the BES had headquarters have tried to negotiate on several occasions without success.
The Portuguese Prosecutor’s Office estimates that the fall of the Espírito Santo Group caused damages exceeding 11.8 billion euros.
The main formal suspect in this process is Salgado, initially accused of 65 charges such as criminal association, active corruption, falsification of documents, embezzlement and money laundering, although he will be prosecuted for 62 due to the statute of limitations on three of the accusations.
Apart from Salgado, there are more than 15 people charged, such as the former accountant of the Espírito Santo Group, Francisco Machado da Cruz; the former administrators of the BES, Almícar Morais Pires and Manuel Fernando Espírito Santo; the former director of the entity’s Financial Department, Isabel Almeida; and António Soares, former director of Novo Banco, which replaced BES.
The process includes complaints from more than 300 people, both individually and collectively, affected by the bank’s collapse.
For those affected with promissory notes, a credit recovery fund was created in 2017 through which clients were able to recover 75% of investments of up to 500 euros and 50% of investments above that amount.
This solution left out the clients of BES branches abroad, as was the case of many emigrants in Venezuela and African countries.
With information from EFE
Related news
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
fbq(‘init’, ‘648851442656403’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);
#Banco #Espírito #Santo #Portugal #Venezuelans #demand
