"It is estimated that the aforementioned processes involve global values whose amounts are close to six trillion kwanzas; ten billion dollars; two billion euros; shareholdings in almost 70 companies, inside and outside the country, as well as such as 300 high-end motor vehicles and 305 properties", said Joel Leonardo, while speaking at the opening session of the workshop on "Asset Forfeiture for Magistrates of Superior Courts".
Joel Leonardo underlined that magistrates need to "move faster", and "by virtue of the principle of legality, fine-tune the mechanisms for locating, surveying, monitoring and preserving these assets, in an unprecedented challenge that requires a high sense of State, a lot of patience, organization, wisdom and responsibility, on the part of magistrates and judicial officials".
Joel Leonardo considered it urgent to equip the judiciary with "highly scientific knowledge, leading to the mastery of new and modern normative legal figures, such as, for example, the crimes underlying money laundering, trafficking in human organs and drugs, the extensive loss of assets, the exceptional nature of the confiscation, the undeniable relevance of preventive arrests, the loss of advantages or the legal regime of the seized assets".
The courts, according to Joel Leonardo, will always be responsible for concretely ascertaining the true provenance of the assets", basing their decisions and "surrounding them with plausible and convincing demonstrative explanations of the demonstrably illicit origin of the assets to be confiscated, in order to protect the national economy".
According to the President of the Supreme Court, in its action, the judiciary's objective in exercising the power to seize assets illegally in possession of the defendants is "to guarantee the future loss of the same assets in favor of the State and never as a vehicle to convert the seizures in preventive arrests".
For the president of the Supreme Court, "the extended loss of assets must effectively translate the reduction of the target's patrimonial sphere", defending that "everything should be done, in the sense that the target will only have assets obtained through the sweat of his honest work, the formal authorities of control (police, Public Prosecutor's Office and courts), be rigorous and technically cautious, in the sieve between lawfully acquired goods and goods that result from illicit financial flows".
