Hélder Pitta Groz, who was speaking on the sidelines of the launch of the Action Manual against Human Trafficking for professionals in the Angolan criminal justice system, said that they had also received a request from Álvaro Sobrinho's lawyers for intervention by the Angolan authorities.
“In fact, we received [a request] from Álvaro Sobrinho's lawyers to see if we could somehow act in relation to the case or have some intervention in the proceedings that are taking place in court,” he said.
The Attorney General stated that “Portugal is a sovereign country, it has its legal instruments,” and Álvaro Sobrinho is an Angolan citizen, but also has Portuguese nationality.
“In Portugal, he is Portuguese, when he is in Angola, he is Angolan. And we collaborated with the Portuguese authorities on some of the questions they put to us, through a letter rogatory, to which we promptly responded and we hope that this response that we sent can contribute to the trial,” he stressed.
According to Hélder Pitta Groz, Álvaro Sobrinho's situation cannot be placed on the same level as that of the former Vice-President, Manuel Vicente, in which the Angolan State intervened to transfer his case to the Angolan courts.
“That was a matter of State, we cannot put it on the same level, because Mr. Manuel Vicente was a matter of State, it was the Angolan State that requested this intervention”, he observed.
This month, the Lisbon Criminal Investigation Court decided to send the former president of Banco Espírito Santo Angola (BESA) Álvaro Sobrinho, the banker Ricardo Salgado and three other defendants to trial, fully validating the Public Prosecutor's Office's accusation.
The reading of the preliminary decision on the BESA case was given by the investigating judge Gabriela Lacerda Assunção at the Central Criminal Investigation Court in Lisbon.
In the preliminary hearing held on 3 June, the Portuguese Public Prosecutor's Office, through prosecutors Rita Madeira and Sandra Oliveira, requested that the five defendants be brought to trial “in the exact terms of the accusation”.
Former banker Álvaro Sobrinho was charged with 18 crimes of breach of trust and five of money laundering, and the former chairman of the Espírito Santo Group, Ricardo Salgado, was charged with five crimes of breach of trust and one of fraud.
