Lisbon, Oct. 22, 2024 (Lusa) - Portuguese businessman Pedro Queiroz Pereira accused fomer Espirito Santo Group chaiman Ricardo Salgado of buying off Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa by handing over BES legal work to the now president's former companion, according to testimony heard on Tuesday in the BES/GES trial.
"Salgado did the following: he took the Legal Department and had it hand over debt collection work to Rita Amaral Cabral, who has a law firm. What for? To recover the relationship with Professor Rebelo de Sousa. If you go, for example, to Rita Amaral Cabral's office, more than half or 60% of the work was given by BES. It was a way of buying Professor Rebelo de Sousa," said the industrialist who died in 2018.
Pedro Queiroz Pereira recalled that there was a deterioration in the relationship between Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and Ricardo Salgado, when the former went to a PSD congress and spoke "badly about GES", because "it was convenient to show that one was against the big economic groups", which left the relationship between the two "very shaky" when they even spent holidays together, according to the former Semapa leader.
"But the interests were too great: Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa's political interest was great, but he needed the money behind it; Salgado had economic power, but no political power. It was the women, Rita Amaral Cabral and Maria João Salgado, who worked on the relationship," revealed the industrialist in his testimony as a witness before the Public Prosecutor's Office (MP) in January 2018.
According to the businessman, who died in August 2018, Ricardo Salgado then acted through Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa's companion to repair the relationship with the former Social Democrat leader, by handing over legal work and subsequently appointing her as a director of Semapa.
"To help Ricardo Salgado, [Rita Amaral Cabral] became a Semapa director in 2004, 2005 or 2006, together with Rui Silveira. And Rui Silveira made a choice in his life, which was to follow Ricardo Salgado to his death. Rui Silveira is a mediocre lawyer, but he performed a very important function of loyalty to his boss," he said.
In the session taking place in Lisbon's Central Criminal Court on Tuesday, which has so far been filled with the audio of Pedro Queiroz Pereira's testimony, the businessman also recalled the war of power with Ricardo Salgado, when BES tried to take over his group through shareholder positions and influence over his sisters.
"At the beginning of the 2000s, banks began to be forced to fulfil more demanding ratios and had to increase their capital. Then they said that demand was eight times higher and that was always a lie... they financed with offshores, competing with the bank's own money, and they went to the newspapers saying that everyone wanted BES shares. And I was so angry about it. That's how they bought my sister Margarida," he noted.
"They gave her the shares in the offshore company and she gave them her shares in the group. But they didn't say who it was, they said it was a Norwegian investor, and then Rita Amaral Cabral and Rui Silveira turned up as directors. Then all they had to do was buy my other sister out. It was a complete scam," he observed, summarising: "I hadn't had any confidence [in Ricardo Salgado] since 2001, but I pretended."
The industrialist also accused Ricardo Salgado and other BES directors, such as Rui Silveira, of thinking that "they were God on Earth, that they ran the country and owned the world" and emphasised the existence of veiled threats from the former chairman of Banco Espírito Santo (BES) to the governor of the Bank of Portugal.
"Ricardo Salgado even threatened the governor of the Bank of Portugal saying: 'I've been here for many years and governors change'. As if to say, ‘I might have to talk to someone to get you out’. It was overbearing," he finalised.
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