Lisbon, Oct. 17, 2024 (Lusa) - The former chairman of Banco Espírito Santo Investimento (BESI), José Maria Ricciardi, said in court On Thursday that former banker Ricardo Salgado ‘took him by storm’ ever since he questioned the former BES chairman's influence on the GES Board of Directors.
Heard as a witness on the third day of the trial in the BES/GES case, Ricardo Salgado's right cousin, with whom he publicly clashed at the end of 2013, explained that he only arrived at the Espírito Santo Group (GES) Superior Council (SC) in 2012, where the five clans were represented, and that he only realised the falsification of the ESI company's accounts at the end of 2013.
‘The first time I arrived at the Superior Council, almost all the members were already there, and my father, the chairman, informed me that the Board couldn't start because Ricardo Salgado wasn't there. I was initially astonished because Ricardo Salgado was a member like any other, but we all had to wait. That was the beginning of a certain disagreement between me and Ricardo Salgado,’ he said.
‘Instead of discussing things, Ricardo Salgado began to talk about what had been done and what would be done, both in the financial and non-financial sectors. I raised my hand and asked if we were going to discuss matters or if we were going to listen to Ricardo Salgado say what we were going to do... from then on, he started to take me at my word because he saw that I wasn't willing to play the same role as the others on the group's board,’ he emphasised.
José Maria Ricciardi, who acknowledged at the beginning of the hearing that he was ‘neither a friend nor an enemy’ of Ricardo Salgado, also explained his positions in various GES entities and what he did when he detected the problems in the accounts.
‘When it became apparent that the accounts were falsified, on 7 December 2013, if I'm not mistaken, I presented a paper for the board minutes saying that I had no knowledge of this and that I wanted an audit and responsibilities to be established,’ he said.
The former chairman of BESI also highlighted the moment when he realised that ESI would be insolvent when former GES accountant Machado da Cruz assumed that the ‘financial hole’ would be much bigger.
'There was a working group that discovered this and said that the 2012 accounts had a difference of €1.2 billion in liabilities and, even so, Machado da Cruz said that in 2013, there was still another I don't know how many billion on top, which meant that the liabilities were not around €3 billion but around €7 billion. For those who know the area, they could see that we were completely insolvent,’ he recognised.
The former chairman of BES, Ricardo Salgado, is the main defendant in the BES/GES case and is facing 62 criminal charges allegedly committed between 2009 and 2014.
Among the offences charged are one of criminal association, 12 of active corruption in the private sector, 29 of qualified fraud, five of infidelity, one of market manipulation, seven of money laundering and seven of document forgery.
In addition to Ricardo Salgado, 17 other defendants are also on trial, namely Amílcar Morais Pires, Manuel Espírito Santo Silva, Isabel Almeida, Machado da Cruz, António Soares, Paulo Ferreira, Pedro Almeida Costa, Cláudia Boal Faria, Nuno Escudeiro, João Martins Pereira, Etienne Cadosch, Michel Creton, Pedro Serra and Pedro Pinto, as well as the companies Rio Forte Investments, Espírito Santo Irmãos, SGPS and Eurofin.
According to the Public Prosecutor's Office, the collapse of GES caused losses of more than €11.8 billion.
JGO/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
