The former president of Banco Português de Negócios, Oliveira e Costa, has been given an extra year in jail to add to the 12 handed out earlier in the week and the 14 years he received in 2017.
The group of judges of the Central Criminal Court of Lisbon, chaired by Luis Ribeiro, have had a chance to go through the paperwork of the main BPN case and decided that Oliveira e Costa should really be given an extra four years for ‘breach of trust.’
The court found that the founder of the SLN / BPN group stole more than €3 million from the Insular Bank of Cape Verde.
This extra sentence brought his accumulated jail time up to 15 years.
In May 2017, Oliveira and Costa was sentenced to 14 years in prison, of which he has actually served two in preventive custody, for ‘falsification of documents, qualified tax fraud, qualified fraud and money laundering.’
In addition to Oliveira Costa, three other defendants - Luis Caprichoso, Francisco Sanches and José Vaz Mascarenhas - were sentenced to prison terms, with the judges barely able to hide their disgust at the behaviour of these bankers.
In another case involving these former BPN directors, for which the sentences were delivered on Monday this week, Oliveira e Costa received a further 12 years in prison for helping himself to the bank’s money.
The banker is not in jail of course, none of them are: Oliveira e Costa can remain out and about while his various appeals are handled by the courts at the pace of a frozen snail.
Banco Português de Negócios (BPN), was the bank that the government controversially bailed out in 2008 after reckless management and malpractice has created an initial debt of €1.8 billion.
José Oliveira e Costa, the former President of BPN, was held mainly responsible for the financial scandal that resulted in the bank being sold off to the Angola’s Banco BIC for €40 million in 2011.
At the end of 2012, the total damage to the Portuguese taxpayer had been around €7 billion.
See also: ‘BPN fraud trials - stiff sentences handed out to former Directors’
