The Lisbon Court of Appeal has upheld Paulo Gonçalves’ two-and-a-half-year suspended prison sentence for active corruption in the E-Tupeira case. Judges have rejected all claims by Benfica’s former legal adviser during Luis Filipe Vieira’s presidency.
The trial court found that in exchange for tickets and other privileges to Eagles games in Lusha, bailiff José Augusto Silva (five years’ suspended prison sentence) improperly agreed to a secret trial in order to provide Paulo Gonçalves with information that he would use ” against other rival clubs or in favor of Benfica.
In his appeal, the former red director questioned the authenticity of the wiretapping and stated that all evidence obtained was prohibited. He admitted, as he had done at trial, that his behavior was “ethically reprehensible,” but denied criminality because premeditation had not been proven. Despite this, if the Court insisted on a conviction, it argued that the offense must progress from corruption to obtaining an undue advantage and that the length of the sentence must be less than two and a half years.
The prosecutor’s office refuted these arguments – “there is a Portuguese expression: one hand washes the other, and both wash themselves, but in this case with the commission of crimes” – and the Court of Appeal confirmed the convictions under the terms of part 1 copy.
Author: João Moniz
Source: CM Jornal
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