According to a statement sent to Agência Lusa, the director of the National Asset Recovery Service (SENRA), Eduarda Rodrigues, recently exonerated, visited São Vicente in prison and tried to convince the businessman to hand over all his assets to the State, which he refused .
Eduarda Rodrigues, who had headed the entity created to manage the process of recovering illegally misappropriated State assets since 2018, was dismissed at the end of September, but had already been the target of a criminal complaint from lawyer Joao Gourgel for alleged “misappropriation or misappropriation of evidentiary documents”, as Lusa reported in May.
Carlos São Vicente's defense says that two weeks after being arrested, on October 6, 2022, the businessman was visited in the Viana prison by the prosecutor, who did not notify the lawyers and “outright”, demanded that he hand over his assets threatening that, if he did not do so, “he would be tried and sentenced for many years”.
The businessman refused, “claiming that the assets belonged to him and that he had obtained it legally through years of work, savings and investment”, say the lawyers, highlighting that this illegal action by the prosecutor was denounced throughout the process, without any given relevance.
After the assets were seized, the statement continues, Eduarda Rodrigues decided to distribute them among various State services, with the process ending “with a manufactured conviction with the most flagrant and shocking violations of the law.
The defense states that Carlos São Vicente has already served half of his sentence and that it would be expected that he would be free, criticizing the fact that the granting of provisional freedom, which is legally mandatory, was not even considered.
“Carlos São Vicente did not give in, he did not confess, he did not hand over the assets he built in decades of a legal and transparent career; Therefore, he is the only accused in the known media cases who is in prison”, they claim, reaffirming that the conviction was “unfair” and insisting on his release, even if provisional, “due to his critical state of health”.
They also say that the businessman, married to Irene Neto, daughter of the first President of Angola, António Agostinho Neto, who had a bank account in Switzerland with 900 million dollars, “lives on a meager retirement pension with which he meets his needs basic food and health that prison does not provide” and that all of the family’s assets were confiscated.
Luso-Angolan businessman Carlos São Vicente was sentenced in March 2022 to nine years in prison and ordered to pay compensation of 500 million dollars.
Carlos São Vicente had been in preventive prison since September 2020. The businessman, who for almost two decades had the insurance and reinsurance monopoly of the state oil company Sonangol, through the AAA group, would have set up a triangular scheme, with companies in Angola, London and Bermuda, which generated millions of dollars in losses for the Treasury.
