The parliamentary committee of inquiry into the management of Banco Espírito Santo and the Espírito Santo Group gets back to work on Tuesday after a two week break.
Since the committee convened on 17 November there have been 115 hours of hearings involving 20 different people.
The first hearing of the new year will be of the auditor of Grupo Espírito Santo, José Manuel Macedo Pereira. Later that day the João Rodrigues Pena, the Chief Executive of Rioforte, will be quizzed.
The committee will be working against a background of 170 investors in BES who have taken a group action and presented a criminal complaint in order to halt the sale of Novo Banco.
The complaint is against the Governor of the Bank of Portugal, the old Banco Espírito Santo management and the board members of Novo Banco.
The plaintiffs feel cheated and say they have lost millions. The Bank of Portugal is singled out for particular culpability in the criminal complaint.
The group’s lawyer last year publicly released the minutes of the meeting that spelled the end of Banco Espírito Santo and now accuses the governor of skullduggery.
The Bank of Portugal has announced that there are 17 organisations interested in buying Novo Banco but the out of pocket BES investors demand that any sale is halted and that it can only go ahead when the court has heard their case.
They say that any money raised from the sale of Novo Banco is theirs as they lost out when the ‘good bank/bad bank’ formula was devised in a hurry by the Bank of Portugal.
