Lisbon, July 18, 2025 (Lusa) - The Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) has charged Joe Berardo and three other defendants with aggravated fraud for simulating a civil action that prevented three national banks from claiming credits worth €1 billion.
According to a statement published on the MP’s official website, on 16 July, the Central Department of Investigation and Penal Action (DCIAP) charged “three individuals, two of whom are lawyers, and one legal entity, the Berardo Collection Association, for acts that it considers to constitute the crime of aggravated fraud”.
The Attorney General’s Office confirmed that one of the individuals charged is Joe Berardo himself.
According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the issue concerns a certificate extracted from the CGD (Caixa Geral de Depósitos) case file, which relates to suspicions about the granting of guarantees to CGD, the defunct Banco Espírito Santo (BES), now Novo Banco, and Banco Comercial Português (BCP) “on 100% of the securities of the Berardo Collection Association, under agreements the parties entered into between 2008 and 2012, concerning loans that entities of the Berardo Group contracted and remain outstanding, totalling approximately one billion euros”.
“By initiating, in 2013, a simulated civil action that created the appearance of a dispute, the three individuals accused, acting in concert, successfully prevented creditor banks from accessing the association’s securities and assets, consisting of works of art valued at hundreds of millions of euros,” explained the DCIAP.
According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the civil action ruling “enabled the defendants to approve resolutions at General Meetings of the Berardo Collection Association that undermined the financial interests of the creditor banks and diverged from the agreements reached in the negotiations and contracts concluded between 2008 and 2010”.
In the main proceedings, Police arrested Joe Berardo on 29 June 2021 in the CGD case and then investigating judge Carlos Alexandre heard him in his first judicial interrogation, imposing a bail of €5 million on him and €1 million on lawyer André Luiz Gomes, also a defendant in the case and then the Madeiran businessman’s legal representative for business matters.
The case, involving 11 defendants, investigates suspicions of various crimes, including aggravated fraud, money laundering and aggravated tax fraud.
Authorities charged Joe Berardo with eight counts of aggravated fraud, money laundering, tax fraud, two counts of aggravated breach of trust and one count of embezzlement, and he had to pay a bail of five million euros and remain in the country, among other coercive measures.
The prosecutor charged André Luíz Gomes, who acts as both lawyer and co-defendant in the case, with the same crimes as the businessman and with four additional crimes of aggravated tax fraud, money laundering, document forgery, and computer fraud relating to his companies; the court required him to pay bail of one million euros, among other precautionary measures.
According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the investigation into the CGD case involves a group “which between 2006 and 2009 contracted four financing operations with CGD, worth around €439 million” and which caused “a loss of almost €1 billion” to CGD, Novo Banco and BCP.
Authorities made the CGD case public after a police operation in which they conducted around fifty searches, including three at bank premises.
According to Portugal’s criminal investigation police agency, PJ, at the time, the group did not comply with the contracts and resorted to “debt renegotiation and restructuring mechanisms to postpone repayment”.
The investigation, which began in 2016, identified “internal procedures in credit granting, restructuring, monitoring and recovery processes that diverged from good banking practices,” the PJ added.
IMA/ADB // ADB.
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