The prosecutor in the case against the former mayor of Tavira be convicted of five crimes allegedly committed when he was in office. The judges will pronounce their verdict on June 29th.
In the second session at Faro court of trial involving the former mayor, lawyer Eduardo Cunha considered that it had been proved that Correia had acted illegally by granting licenses in areas of the National Ecological Reserve (REN).
Cunha did not request any specific penalty for the former mayor.
Correia was mayor of Tavira between 1998 and 2009 and went on to be elected mayor of Faro where he was found guilty of planning infractions and was suspended in 2013.
Macário Correia’s defence team, led by Artur Cansado, requested his client’s acquittal and refuted the idea that the mayor has taken licensing decisions 'to someone’s benefit' relating to two swimming pools at private homes on countryside land in the Tavira district.
Cansado asked the judges to treat the five crimes of malfeasance as one continuous crime - this would attract a lower penalty.
Eduardo Cunha said that "there was an intention by the decision maker to benefit someone," although no trade-off had been proven. The objective seems to have been to halt the desertification of mountain areas.
The prosecutor also criticised the lack of mitigating factors to justify the approval of the projects in an REN area, such as the existence of ancient ruins on the property or that the applicant did not have his own home and lived with their parents, or had land where he wanted to build a house and settle down with a partner.
"The intention to have people settle in the mountains underlies these approvals," said the prosecutor in his closing arguments.
The defence lawyer said that "there was not any kind of favouritism on the part of the accused" and that the five planning approvals in question, which came from hundreds of cases examined during the investigation, did have overriding factors that justified them.
Two more prominent Algarve names are in trouble over missing funds at the trade association ACRAL.
Former president of ACRAL João Rosado (pictured below) and the former treasurer Feliciano Rito have been accused of embezzlement.
In a statement, ACRAL claimed that the two former leaders who held office between February 2009 and March 2013 had been accused of the crime by Évora’s Central Department of Investigation and Penal Action, after three years of detailed research.
"ACRAL will wait serenely for the trial and expects that if the charge is proved, whoever committed this crime will receive a fitting punishment" said Álvaro Viegas, the current association president.
