Several of those affected by the collapse of Banco Espírito Santo (BES) in Venezuela and other countries gathered this Tuesday in front of the headquarters of the Central Criminal Court of Lisbon, where the macro-trial for the intervention of the entity ten years ago began, to demand the return of your assets and savings.
Almost 2,000 people, both inside and outside Portugal, suffered the consequences, like Fátima Rufino, whose parents, emigrants in Venezuela, deposited their money in the bank, like “the vast majority of Portuguese” who lived there.
It was an entity “with a lot of renown”, which is why the intervention of the Bank of Portugal caught them by surprise. In fact, they found out through the media.
At that time, the BES managers “took advantage of the naivety and trust of the immigrants and unfortunately let them down,” Rufino explained to EFE, who represents the interests of his parents, since his father died 8 years ago and his mother He could not be present in court this Tuesday for health reasons.
Mass deception
This professional accountant stressed that the BES deceived many families, older people 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,” he stressed. Rufino, who preferred not to talk about specific amounts and limited himself to clarifying that it was a large sum.
Venezuelan Irene Gómes, 49 years old, was another of those affected who were at the Justice Campus in the Portuguese capital this Tuesday: Her father, a native of Madeira (Portugal), had a fixed-term account at the BES along with his brothers, in which they deposited a family inheritance.
His father lost around two hundred thousand euros, but his cousins and uncles, some of them already deceased, lost much larger amounts, and even all of their savings.
Gómes, like Rufino, blamed the banking agents: “My father’s manager, along with others, traveled to Venezuela (from Portugal) exclusively to recruit this type of clients, small merchants, people who had all their savings there and they were going to sell them these products,” he explained.
Historical event
The process that is beginning, one of the largest in the history of Portugal, will judge more than 300 crimes related to the alleged falsification of the accounting of the Espírito Santo Services holding company between 2009 and 2014, the origin of the collapse of the entity and the intervention of the central bank of Portugal.
Before the start of the trial, a hearse, a symbol of those affected by the fall of the BES, parked in front of the Justice Campus.
The vehicle, with signs with messages such as ‘they killed our savings, now it is time for justice’, was escorted by sixteen people, dressed in black and with the names of the accused in the case on their t-shirts.
Voice of the defenders
The president of the Association for the Defense of Banking Clients (ABESD), Francisco Carvalho, who is demanding 330 million euros for those affected, said, in a statement to EFE, that “today hope is reborn to recover the losses and that justice start doing your job.”
Carvalho belongs to the second generation of those affected by the fall of the entity, where his father had deposited the family assets and with which they could have paid for two high-end cars. The loss made it difficult for them to finish paying their mortgage.
The ABESD spokesperson, who is one of the 700 witnesses in the process, stressed that the bank never offered any solution and that the different governments have tried to negotiate on several occasions without success.
Lisbon / EFE
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