Lisbon, June 27, 2025 (Lusa) - Several transfers to Sporting Lisbon Football Club originating from Banco Espírito Santo Angola (BESA) are among the transactions that BESA refused to explain to Espírito Santo bank, said a person responsible for the audit requested by the Bank of Portugal on Friday in court.
"It was a cross-cutting issue. Most of the time when requests for clarification are made to BESA, there is no response or an inconclusive response," said Vera Pita, testifying at the trial of the BESA case in Lisbon, the person responsible for the Angolan subsidiary's part of the audit of BES requested in 2014 by the Bank of Portugal from the consultancy Deloitte.
Vera Pita was speaking after being questioned by the public prosecutor's office about a request from BES's compliance department to BESA to cover four transfers to Sporting that were made using an account of the Angolan bank based at BES in Lisbon.
The request, made under the anti-money laundering law, "was not answered".
The financial consultancy emphasised that the request does not mean that an "operation is irregular", but that there are increased risk factors, such as the amount of the transfers and the fact that it is a sports entity.
According to the public prosecutor's office, Álvaro Sobrinho, the Angolan president of BESA at the time, ordered the transfer of a total of around €15 million to a Sporting account in 2011 and 2012, using funds provided by BES as his own to increase the liquidity of the Angolan subsidiary.
The 62-year-old Angolan banker is one of the five official suspects in the case, which mainly concerns the alleged misappropriation of funds between 2007 and 2012 from financing between BES and BESA in International Monetary Market (IMM) credit lines and bank overdrafts.
Among the other defendants are former banker Ricardo Salgado, the boss of BES, 81 and suffering from Alzheimer's, and his former right-hand man, Amílcar Morais Pires, 63, the only one who has so far given evidence at the trial.
In general, the defendants are answering for abuse of trust, money laundering and fraud and deny committing the offences.
The trial began on 5 May at Lisbon's Central Criminal Court and the Deloitte consultant is the first witness to be heard in Friday's session.
BES went bankrupt in the summer of 2014 and BESA was liquidated the following October.
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