Lusa - Business News - Portugal: Criminalising illicit enrichment 'difficult' - association

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Lusa - Business News - Portugal: Criminalising illicit enrichment 'difficult' - association

Lisbon,April19,2024(Lusa)-The criminalisation of illicit enrichment "can be useful" in the fight against corruption, but turning it into law in a form that "passes the sieve" of the Constitutional Court and has criminal effectiveness "will be difficult", said the association Frente Cívica.
The coalition government led by Pedro Passos Coelho first tried to pass the criminalisation of illicit enrichment into law in 2012, with a speaker of parliament's decree, sent by the President at the time, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, for preventive review by the Constitutional Court, which decided that the rules were unconstitutional.
The same thing happened in 2015, with another attempt by Passos Coelho's government failing to pass the Constitutional Court (TC).
The fact that the idea has resurfaced in the programme of the Democratic Alliance (AD) government is something that, for the vice-president of the Civic Front, João Paulo Batalha, is easily explained.
"In political terms, it's easy to propose and it's popular. And so it's natural that it comes up all the time. The truth is that it has already come up against the TC's reservations and even if a wording is found that passes the TC's sieve, I think it will be difficult to have a wording that makes a law like this truly effective, without clashing with the judicial culture," he told Lusa.
In João Paulo Batalha's opinion, "anything that seems or can be interpreted as a reversal of the burden of proof will have problems with the TC and even if we get a formulation that doesn't have problems with the TC, it will have problems in the courts in terms of application", generating "immediately a lot of doctrine" to the contrary, leading to the new type of crime and its criminal application following "the same path as the undue receipt of an advantage, of influence peddling, which are in the law, but are not applied because they are not in our judicial culture".
In this regard, João Paulo Batalha pointed out that, of the most publicised cases, he only remembers one conviction for influence peddling, that of former Socialist minister Armando Vara.
The vice-president of the Civic Front said that "it could be useful" for the fight against corruption to criminalise illicit enrichment, regulate lobbying or allow mechanisms of reward law (the so-called 'plea bargain', as it is called in Brazil), but he argues that "all of this has to be discussed very rigorously, it has to be legislated very carefully and in a very participatory way, assessing well what already exists and its effectiveness".
"We're making very progressive laws, which then come up against institutions that either don't have the means or don't have a culture that is in line with progressive legislation, so it's of little use," he said.
Still on the subject of lobbying, he recalled the hasty process of attempting to regulate it in parliament right at the end of the legislature, which "would, to a large extent, do more harm than good", especially with regard to the activity of lawyers, emphasising that one could fall into the contradiction of having law firms in Portugal registered as lobbyists in Brussels, but not on national territory, with the action of these professionals falling within the scope of the activity's own acts "If we regulate lobbying in a way that leaves out lawyers, we're actually creating a market for transparent lobbying, in which you have to register who the lobbyist is, who is paying the lobbyist, what interests they are defending, and at the same time we're creating a parallel lobbying market, which is a market that already exists today for law firms, and if they stay outside the law they can continue to exercise a market that becomes even more lucrative, which is discreet or opaque lobbying," he criticised.
IMA/ADB // ADB.
Lusa

Agency : LUSA
Date : 2024-04-20 10:08:00

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