A judge at Portimão Court has acquitted former Portimão vice-mayor Luís Carito and nine other defendants of all the crimes they were accused of, claiming that none of their charges could be proven.
Luís Carito, businessmen Artur Curado, Luís Marreiros and Carlos Barros and six commercial companies were on trial charged with crimes of money laundering, qualified fraud and participation in illegal business deals, allegedly committed in contracts for the installation of Cidade do Cinema, in Portimão, a project that cost 1.3 million euros and ended up in nothing. Mayors, businessmen and consultants travelled from all over from Los Angeles to Cannes, passing through London, on promotional campaigns to make the Algarve a destination for film production. In the end, the municipality of Portimão was left in debt, and potential investors did not appear.
The former mayor was also acquitted from the crime of document damage (for having swallowed a document in the searches), since, according to the court, it was not possible to determine its content and relevance for the process. The Court of Portimão was only able to prove the existence of the contracts concluded between the municipal companies Turis and Urbis and the companies involved in the alleged creation of the “City of Cinema” in Portimão.
However, according to the court, the contracts they were able to recover, or which weren’t gobbled up by Mr. Carito, did not harm the public purse nor aggravate the existing debt of the Câmara de Portimão. Meanwhile, the prosecution claims that the defendants knowingly participated in the diversion of 4.6 million euros from the State, through a "fraudulent scheme", with the involvement of companies managed by businessmen, within the scope of the alleged creation of the "City of Cinema.”
In the final allegations, the Public Prosecutor's Office (MP) requested the acquittal of all 10 of defendants from all the crimes they had been accused of, considering that it had not been proven "that they acted in a concerted manner, harmed Portimão, or obtained their own benefits".
Speaking to journalists at the end of the judgment reading, Luís Carito was "very happy with the decision to absolve" in a process "with great media presence, in which his name and that of the other defendants was put in the mud".
"Finally, I can look directly at everyone and say that this whole situation was proved to be a mistake, or something else," said the former mayor. Mr. Carito added that all the documentation in the file will be analyzed, "in order to verify whether the complaints made at the time were supported or not to proceed with such a process".
"In reality, this process ended up going nowhere, as we expected," said the former vice-mayor, stressing that he was "with a completely calm conscience". The lawyer Sancho Carvalho Nunes, who defending Mr. Carito in court, declined to talk about the possibility of legal actions being brought against anyone else: "we will wait for the judgment to become final and then we will make a decision, but calmly, "he said.
“Today justice has been done and justice is done on trial and not in the newspapers," he concluded.
Questioned by journalists, Mr. Carito refused to reveal the contents of the paper that he swallowed during the police searches, remarking: “I don’t know what it was.”
Mr. Carito’s actions seem completely lawful, and absolutely not at all suspicious…
