There is no one to stop the political crisis in Portugal, but the investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office that triggered it is getting smaller by the minute. On Monday, Judge Nuno Dias Costa released the five detainees, whom he did not consider suspected of corruption or prevarication, against the criteria of the Public Ministry. The magistrate considered their prison “disproportionate”, decreed by the prosecutors of Operation Influencer, who arrested them a week ago in an operation that unleashed an institutional tsunami, since it caused the resignation of the prime minister, António Costa, after it was announced that his role in the approval of several energy projects was going to be investigated by the Supreme Court, and the call for early elections for next March 10. Although it will be the Supreme Court that will have to issue its final conclusion, the investigating judge has indicated in his resolution on Monday that the prosecutors’ suspicions about the pressure that would have been exerted on Costa to carry out these projects are poorly founded, according to the newspaper. Public.
The magistrate, in addition, only charged Vítor Escária, former chief of staff of the Prime Minister, António Costa, and the lawyer Diogo Lacerda Machado with a crime of influence peddling. He attributed crimes of influence peddling and bribery to the representatives of the Start Campus company, Alfonso Salema and Rui Oliveira Neves. The mayor of Sines, Nuno Mascarenhas, also arrested and imprisoned for six nights, was released without any criminal charges.
The judge’s resolution, collected by Expresso, maintains that the facts described by the Prosecutor’s Office do not demonstrate the existence of passive or active corruption since the investigators failed to present the existence of “a consideration for specific conduct.” Thus, he alone charged Vítor Escária, former chief of staff of the Prime Minister, António Costa, and the lawyer Diogo Lacerda Machado, a friend from Costa’s youth, with a crime of influence peddling, on whom he imposed bail of 150,000 euros. Both of them have their passports withdrawn due to the risk of flight – a concern that he shares with prosecutors – from Lacerda to Guinea-Bissau, where he has professional relationships and “it would be easy for him to hide”, and from Escária to Angola, where he worked in the past. .
The blow that the investigating judge gives in his resolution to the prosecutors, who requested preventive detention for Lacerda and Escária and are going to appeal the precautionary measures imposed, adds to several errors that had surfaced in the investigation. One of them was the confusion of António Costa’s name with that of his Minister of Economy, António Costa Silva, in the transcription of a telephone conversation between Diogo Lacerda Machado and the executive president of Start Campus, Alfonso Salema. It would be Lacerda himself in his statement before Judge Nuno Dias Costa who would warn of this confusion of great importance, since Salema was asking his consultant and friend of the Prime Minister to try to influence the Portuguese Government to demand from the European Commission a modification to benefit Start Campus, promoter of the construction of a gigantic data storage center in Sines. “Then I see how we take the initiative to provoke and suggest. If it were Finance, I would talk to [el ministro Fernando] Medina or with António Mendes, who is the Secretary of State. If it were Economy, I would prepare a way to later reach António Costa himself,” Diogo Lacerda responds to Salema.
Another error that has been brought to light Expresso affects an alleged decision by João Galamba, arguido in the case and that on Monday he resigned as Minister of Infrastructure. Prosecutors considered that Start Campus had influenced Galamba to prepare a draft decree to take advantage of the use of gas pipeline land of the National Electric Network (REN) for its fiber data cables, but the identification of the decree that they included in their investigation corresponds to another matter that has nothing to do with the case.
Galamba’s resignation will be one of the issues that will be addressed by the resigning Prime Minister António Costa and the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who will meet this afternoon at the Belém Palace. Since the crisis broke out, Costa has reiterated that he never carried out “illegal or reprehensible acts” but that the mere fact of being investigated for a suspicion was incompatible with the “dignity” of the position of prime minister.
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