The Portuguese police made several arrests today as part of an investigation into an illegal operation that enabled people to pay to have their driving licences scrubbed clean and reissued.
Raids took place at a lawyer’s office, the Portuguese Automobile Club, the traffic division of the PSP, the National Authority for Road Safety (NARS), the Transport Mobility Institute (IMT) and the Municipal Police. A total of 31 warrants were executed.
Investigators say the scam has been going on since 2015 with illegal access gained to the computer records of drivers with points on their licenses. The drivers were then contacted and ‘for a fee’ could have their records wiped clean and a new license issued showing no recorded offences.
The fraud has been run by an extensive network of lawyers and public officials as well as one or more employees of the Automobile Club of Portugal.
The illegal scheme has been tracked for 18 months and today’s raids were ordered by the Department of Investigation and Penal Action in Lisbon - charges include active and passive corruption, illegitimate access, computer manipulation, personal favoritism, denial of justice and malfeasance.
The National Authority for Road Safety’s chairman, Pedro Silva, said that staff are "to provide full support and availability to the authorities."
The Institute for Mobility and Transport was shut down and the staff sent home while searches continued into the afternoon.
The president of the Automobile Club of Portugal, Carlos Barbosa, flatly denies the club had been involved in any driving license scam.
The police seem to have been targeting individuals rather than their employers, suggesting that there was no involvement of the organisations mentioned, with selected employees identified as members of the driving license crime ring.
