Operation Influencer judge calls MP’s suspicions against Antonio Costa “vague” and “contradictory”

Judge Nuno Diaz Costa, in charge of Operation Influential Man, says the State Department’s (SD) allegations against outgoing Prime Minister Antonio Costa are “vague” and contradictory.

In a 17-page order in which CM had access, the judge also believes that, contrary to the statements of the deputy, there is no evidence that João Galamba was the mastermind of the criminal scheme in the interests of Start Campus entrepreneurs.

The investigating judge also criticized the fact that in the appeal against the coercive measures applied to the five accused, the prosecutor’s office refers to new facts that were not presented at the first judicial interrogation.

In the response of Judge Nuno Díaz Costa to the deputy’s appeal to the Court of Appeal challenging the coercive measures applied to the defendants, none of which deprived them of their liberty, the judge argues that “the prosecutor’s office had a need to support its position, to refer to new facts that it did not assert, promoting the application of a coercive measure other than TIR to the defendants.

“The court was therefore unable to take into account in the appealed decision” such new facts, which the deputy refers to in the Lisbon Court of Appeal.