Marco Baptista, a former candidate for the Covilha Chamber, filed a criminal complaint against Luis Santos, PSD district president of Castelo Branco and then campaign manager, on charges of qualified fraud related to campaign payments in 2017.
At issue is €36,500 spent on posters that went unpaid after Baptista disappeared following his election defeat due to a “psychotic breakdown” when he “began to believe he had committed suicide,” according to the complaint about crime against which CM had access.
The former candidate advanced the company 20 thousand euros from his personal account, ensuring that the current constituency leader knew about it, but went to present the total amount of expenses that the PSD must pay, damaging the party in the amount already paid by Baptista.
“They accepted the damage they caused to the PSD,” the document said, adding that Luis Santos received “personal gain” in the process. Speaking to the CM, the district manager seemed surprised by the criminal complaint and said that “the company spent two months asking for money” after the disappearance, accusing the former candidate of “taking care of the financial part” and ensuring that it was left out of “all issues” related to these funds.
Luis Santos expressed regret that the complaint appeared a few months before the elections in which he could have been a candidate for parliament, saying that it was “the second part of what has already been decided”, recalling the agreement between the PSD and Marco Baptista in 2022, in in which the former candidate agreed to pay 40 thousand euros for unauthorized campaign expenses.
Convicted of stealing money
Marco Baptista was sentenced to four years and six months in prison, suspended, for embezzling some 120,000 euros from the Rede de Judiarias de Portugal, where he worked as a consultant. We were talking about crimes of qualified fraud and forgery of documents. The engineer transferred money to personal accounts several weeks before his disappearance in 2017.