Lisbon, May 21, 2026 (Lusa) - A decisive forensic assessment for a court in Portugal, deciding whether former banker Ricardo Salgado will go to prison over cases stemming from the EDP energy company and the Operation Marques corruption case, concluded that the ex-banker is unable to understand why he must serve a sentence.
“Although he may retain a very generic understanding of the existence of a legal process, this will be merely the mechanical replication of indications that he is in an assessment context, without integrating the true axiological notion of the process, namely the relationship between the facts and the sentence, the reason why it applies to him, its duration and the purpose of its execution,” reads an 11 May report that Lusa accessed on Thursday.
The 81-year-old Alzheimer’s patient and former chair of Banco Espírito Santo (BES, a defunct Portuguese bank) faces two prison sentences of six years and three months, and eight years.
The Lisbon Central Criminal Court will calculate his cumulative sentence on 26 May.
The cumulative sentence is the total prison term Ricardo Salgado must serve.
The calculation follows a specific formula rather than a simple sum of individual convictions.
Salgado’s defence says that, since the court has not terminated the criminal proceedings, it must suspend the former banker's sentence due to his "psychic anomaly," even if it exceeds the five-year maximum legal limit for suspension.
The southern branch of the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences conducted the forensic psychiatric report.
It notes that the former BES chair is also “unable to independently manage his daily life within a prison environment.”
It adds that his imprisonment could present an “increased risk of disorganisation, functional decline, falls, and an inability to adhere to therapy and daily routines.”
In the trial stemming from the EDP case, the court sentenced Ricardo Salgado to six years and three months in prison for bribing former minister Manuel Pinho (2005–2009) to benefit the Espírito Santo Group (GES, the bank's parent conglomerate) in town-planning matters, among others.
Regarding the trial stemming from the Operation Marquês case, the court handed the former banker an eight-year prison term for breach of trust after he misappropriated €10.7 million from GES in 2011.
The original convictions date back to 2024 and 2022, respectively.
The report states that Salgado’s first Alzheimer's symptoms appeared in 2017, he attended his first medical consultation in 2019, and doctors formalised the diagnosis in 2021.
The forensic expertise rules out any “overall deliberate simulation” of the incurable neurodegenerative disease.
IB/LYT // ADB.
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