Senior advisers in the Espírito Santo organisation made every effort to persuade their clients who had bank accounts in the Swiss subsidiary not to take advantage of the Portuguese government’s tax amnesty and to leave the money where it was, rather than transfer it to Portugal.
According to Correio da Manha, a letter sent by Compagnie Financière Espírito Santo to Portuguese millionaire depositors in its Swiss bank suggested that they could have trouble with the law if they repatriated funds to Portugal.
This was despite Ricardo Salgado (pictured), then the CEO of Banco Espírito Santo, taking advantage of one of the tax amnesty periods that he advised his clients to ignore.
In the letter to wealthy depositors, Compagnie Financière Espírito Santo advised its clients in Switzerland not to take up the Exceptional Regularization Tax Regime (RERT II) offer, a mechanism created in April 2010 to repatriate funds from abroad in return for leniency and absolution.
The Espirito Santo Group in Switzerland was using depositors’ money to fund group companies such as Rioforte and the last thing it needed was depositors wanting their money back..
In the letter, Espírito Santo Group responded to several questions from customers, explaining that there was no advantage in transferring funds and alerting the Portuguese authorities, and that there might be problems with the law if they did.
Espírito Santo Group thus aimed to halt any requests for funds to be transferred to Portugal as it would drain its resources which already had been channelled to fund its own failing offshoots.
