The crimes include qualified forgery, aggravated fraud and computer fraud and resulted in three former employees of Portuguese bank Banif managing to steal €10 million from its customers.
These serious offences and the huge amount of money involved resulted in sentences that were suspended if each defendant pays €400,000 back to the bank – within the next five years.
The three defendants also must pay a total of €10.8 million back to Banif.
The two former managers and a director of Banif's Guimarães branch started to steal money in 1996 and continued without being spotted until 2003, illustrating the less than robust nature of the bank’s internal controls.
The defendants set up a complex scheme that allowed them to pinch large sums of money from the accounts of individual customers, without the customers or the bank becoming aware that anything was amiss.
Accounts were opened in the customers’ names with the address entered as that of the bank branch so the defendants could control deposits and withdrawals.
Using cash deposited by customer who were assured that the money was for fixed term deposits the cash was diverted into the mirror accounts.
The three defendants then started to have fun, investing in domestic and offshore financial products including currency speculation, and various transactions on the stock exchange. To perform these operations they falsified supporting documents yet no one at Banif suspected anything illegal was going on.
Banif’s internal auditors eventually spotted that something was amiss and the bank prosecuted the employees, or ex-employees as they were then as they all were sacked. The bank applied to the court for €20 million, a sum that the court halved.
Banif's lawyer Nuno Cerejeira Namora said that today’s judgement was fair but ages late as almost a decade has passed since the bank first went to court. He added that the judgment shows that "the court is not only effective and severe on small pickpockets and thieves, it increasingly is adept at pursuing and punishing white collar crime."
