António Mira has been sentenced by the Court of Portimão to five years in prison for embezzlement and document forgery but the sentence was suspended.
Mira was sentenced to three years in prison for each of the seven counts of embezzlement and one year in prison for each of the four crimes of forging documents, all to run concurrently. (1)
The suspended sentence of five years was accompanied by an immediate fine of €6,000.
According to the judgment, the prison sentence is suspended on the condition that the defendant pay, within four years, more than €332,000 with interest, the sum that Monchique council claimed that Mira had stolen.
The judges agreed that Mira had "intentionally" stolen money while in a position of trust and had acted with the intention of keeping the funds resulting from his actions.
The former Socialist Party councillor was the Council’s chief financial officer and was accused by the Public Ministry of seven crimes of embezzlement and four of forgery committed between 2003 and 2009.
The lawyer Carlos de Almeida Lemos, representing Monchique council said that "justice has been done."
"It was close to what we wanted, which was having the sums agreed and returned to the council," said the lawyer.
The former vice-president duplicated invoices that allowed him to obtain double payments, but claimed that the money was intended to compensate staff for overtime and holidays during which they worked.
According to the Mira, the forgeries allowed him to get money "to deal with expenses that could not be paid with documentation."
"It was an unthinking attitude," Mira admitted to the judges, but denied that he had used the money for personal gain, only "to pay overtime and holiday pay to some employees after the 2003 and 2004 fires."
António Mira said that cash payment to employees had been delivered in envelopes by himself and by the then mayor, Carlos Tuta, who led the council for 27 years until 2009 when Rui André took over and discovered that significant sums were missing from the council's treasury.
As for Mira’s assertion that the money he had liberated from the council’s coffers was used to pay staff, only six of 250 questioned admitted to accepting such payments and the judges concluded that the amount nicked was far more than the staff had ever received.
This case has dragged on since 2009 but is not over yet as Mira is set to appeal his sentence.
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(1) No, I can't make this add up either. Ed
