Leiria court sentenced lawyer to seven and a half years in prison for 30 crimes

The Leiria Judicial Court sentenced the lawyer to one sentence of seven and a half years’ imprisonment for two crimes of qualified fraud and 28 crimes of forgery.

The defendant, 50, was also ordered to pay the assistant €41,120.74 in addition to €21,678.92 to the couple who also became assistants for damages.

The panel of judges also determined a loss of benefits for the accused, who until at least 2017 practiced law in Pombal, ordering her to pay the state 60,299.66 euros, according to a ruling dated Monday that Luz’s agency had access to. .

The case dates back to the end of 2015 – beginning of 2016, when the man admitted to his girlfriend that he was a partner and manager of the company, and she “had a lot of debts, and she was afraid to be responsible for them.” in addition to the fact that he “was convicted in two cases of driving without a legal license.”

Confronted with the situation, the friend “informed him that she knew the accused as she had been handling some of her family’s affairs” and the man appointed a lawyer “as his representative to represent him in the two criminal trials and resolve his situation in court.” towards the company of which he was a member.”

The lawyer told the man that he would have to file for bankruptcy for the company, and later suggested that he do the same for two other companies in which he was a partner.

The defendant’s fee will be three thousand euros for each bankruptcy, “which will require the bankruptcy of three companies, as well as their individual insolvency,” the ruling says. There was no written fee agreement.

According to the facts proven in court, the accused in February 2016 began to demand from the man, through his girlfriend, “the issuance of sums of money, citing the fact that they are necessary to pay fines, procedural costs and other legal costs.” .

To obtain the money, the attorney sent the assistant’s girlfriend “written and emailed communications, including bank account numbers and ATM payment links, and documents she had prepared,” as if they were uniform payment documents issued by the Institute of Justice. Equipment for financial management and justice.

However, the amounts demanded by the defendant “were not due in the proceedings in which she was involved” and the lawyer “distributed the money she sought for other purposes, mainly to pay out-of-pocket expenses, fines and procedural costs for which the defendant herself was responsible.” .

The assistant “had to rely on the help” of his girlfriend and her family “as well as loans” to deliver the amounts required by the defendant.

“When purchasing goods and services for herself, the defendant included the taxpayer number and the name of an assistant on her receipts, ‘without her knowledge or permission, doing so several times,'” the court argued.

The lawyer followed the same behavior towards the married couple.

The panel found that the defendant acted to obtain financial benefits that she knew were not due her, managing to get her assistants to hand over successive sums of money to her “as a result of a deception she perpetrated on them, which led them to believe, erroneously, that such the amounts were intended to pay legal costs.”

The lawyer, already convicted of qualified fraud and simple fraud, also acted with the intent to “use documents which she had prepared by photocopying, cutting, collaging and scanning and in which she mentioned processes, courts, references and amounts to be paid, knowing that there were not true.”

By preparing and using such documents, the lawyer knew that “she was questioning the security and validity of the legal circulation of documents of this type and that by using them she would give credibility to the story she had invented.”