Victims of BES regret that the prosecutor’s office does not recognize them, and demand material justice

The ABESD Victims’ Association on Tuesday expressed regret that the Public Prosecutor’s Office did not mention the victims/survivors in the document published on the GES/BES process and called for decisions that guarantee them material justice and compensate them for their financial losses.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the ABESD – Association for the Protection of Bank Clients – says it recognizes the work of the judiciary in the investigation into the collapse of the Espirito Santo Group and Banco Espírito Santo, but regrets that in the document released by the Ministry of Public Affairs on Monday (in which it reviews the work of the investigation and prosecution) there is no mention of the victims and it considers that the prosecutor’s office “cannot solve the main issue for thousands of victims and survivors: the reimbursement of lost money due to criminal acts.”

“The document makes no mention of the terms ‘victim’ or ‘survivor,’ which is particularly telling and troubling as it appears to ignore the devastating human and financial impact this scheme has had on thousands of individuals and families,” ABESD said in a statement.

The association says that in the 10 years since the collapse of GES/BES, “no specific measures have been identified to protect victims” and that this reinforces the feeling that the justice system is “unable to provide material justice” and calls for the creation of measures of material compensation for victims/survivors.

“Our association, far from demagogy, calls on the prosecutor’s office and all the structures involved to mobilize around decisions that will return to the injured parties what was taken from them. Justice is achieved not only by punishing the guilty, but above all by compensating the victims,” ​​he says.

ABESD also states that the prosecutor’s office would not have been able to carry out all this investigative work “without the cooperation and self-sacrifice of the injured parties, the true owners of the resources that were redirected to these criminal schemes,” therefore the prosecutor’s office, as the defender of the Rule of Law, “must be the entity most interested in the rapid return of assets to the injured parties.”

The association said the lack of action in this regard “calls into question the effectiveness of a system that, although rigorous in its investigations, appears slow and insufficient in repairing the damage.”

The statement cited the Bernard Madoff case in the United States, noting that the Justice Department there took proactive steps to ensure that assets were returned to victims before sentencing.

“The North American justice system has demonstrated that in the face of large-scale fraud, the priority must be to compensate victims,” the association says, arguing that “a truly effective justice system must be able to combine investigative rigor with practical measures and tangible results for those who have suffered the most.”

Ten years after the fall of BES, the main criminal case, the BES/GES trial, is expected to begin in October. In the criminal proceedings, about 2,000 injured clients have been granted victim status by judges and are also seeking compensation. The prosecutor’s office opposed this status in court.

On Monday, the ministry published a document on the GES/BES investigation, which took place between 2014 and 2023, summarizing the allegations made in seven cases.

According to the prosecutor’s office, in these cases “several dozen individuals and legal entities have been charged and in some cases already convicted, in some cases in more than one investigation, they have been charged with more than 630 crimes.”

The prosecutor’s office also reported that the investigation had established that “the benefits from the crimes were found to be worth a total of approximately 18 billion euros and 211 million US dollars worldwide.”