Are we finally getting somewhere in the fight against corruption? Portugal’s State Prosecutors have a list of over one hundred names to whom the Grupo Espírito Santo subsidiary ES Enterprises paid out tax free money, sometimes regularly for years.
There are politicians, civil servants, public sector managers, mayors, businessmen and journalists - all on the Ricardo Salgado payroll and all in secret.
The list from ES Enterprises, the Espírito Santo Group company that handled all these bungs and bribes, has names and amounts ranging from monthly payments to one off amounts paid frpm an offshore account in the British Virgin Islands or handed over in cash.
Some payments have been going on for 20 years or more and have never been reconciled with the company's accounts or personal tax statements of the recipients. Some bungs went to BES managers and others, more curiously, to named individuals at Portugal Telecom.
The frustration is that the State Prosecutors have had this ‘explosive’ list for a year, yet there have been no arrests.
When police went to Espírito Santo Group premises after the bank collapsed in 2014, they found €2 million in cash in a safe, in another safe there was €1.16 million - both with no accompanying paperwork.
Portugal’s public expects results and is tiring of news of arrests and the involvement of bankers in the collapse of several institutions when nothing seems to happen as a result – certainly not one banker yet is sitting in jail yet the taxpayer has been stripped of €14 billion to cover up the actions of the incompetent, the greedy, the reckless and the criminal.
These men seemed to have engineered themselves into positions of power in the financial sector while lacking the moral compass to be trusted with the ship.
Since 2008, four major banks have collapsed yet those responsible have walked away with suspended sentences or acquittals. The banking regulator Carlos Costa who, as Governor of the Bank of Portugal, has seen disaster after disaster on his watch claims that nothing is his fault despite the pattern of destruction being obvious.
There are no criminal charges resulting in the recent collapse of Banif despite it costing the taxpayer up to €4 billion. Can the directors really be absolved and the collapse put down to ‘market conditions?
In the 2014 BES collapse we were told there were five major processes originating from 73 complaints but not a single case has come to court.
Despite the former banker Ricardo Salgado being under house arrest suspected of forgery, fraud, tax fraud, corruption and money laundering, he lounges around writing his memoires having successfully persuaded the judge that he is close to broke and can not afford an appropriate bail figure.
There has been no word from the new Justice Minister Francisca van Dunem on when cases will come to court and the longer this farce continues, the less Portugal looks like a country in which overseas businesses will want to invest.
Access to justice is a key determinant for investment decisions but with the financial system hardly regulated under Carlos Costa and cases taking years to come to court, if at all, it is little wonder that Wall Street continues to treat Portugal as a joke and other countries' VC and sovereign funds continue to steer clear.
