Leiria court sentences 71-year-old woman to prison for fraud and forgery

According to the ruling of the Judicial Court of Leiria, the 71-year-old woman was sentenced to prison for qualified fraud and forgery, in which the lawyer was also convicted, but with a suspended sentence.

According to the document, the septuagenarian from Alcobaça was convicted of five offenses of qualified fraud and five offenses of forgery and sentenced to six years in prison, with a panel of judges saying she had acted with the help of forged documents. , to obtain economic benefits from family assets.

The panel of judges also decided that the defendant must pay the state about 260,000 euros, an amount that “she embezzled and could not have been confiscated,” according to Thursday’s ruling, and to which Lusa now has access.

The 47-year-old lawyer from Leiria was found guilty of five offenses of forgery and sentenced to three and a half years in prison, suspended for the same period, with probation.

The first situation dates back to 2015, when a seventy-year-old man in a law office issued a “document acknowledging a private debt with a voluntary mortgage,” acting on behalf of two children, and “declared that they were debtors in common and in equal parts.” to the couple from the sum of 32,500 euros that he lent them.

To ensure payment of the debt, they “submitted a voluntary mortgage in favor of the creditor spouses on a portion of the building,” the court decision said, noting that the defendant used “a document called a ‘power of attorney’ signed with the names of her children.”

In order to “ensure the authenticity of the power of attorney for this document and the corresponding signatures,” the lawyer “prepared a certificate signed and sealed by her with the “registration on the computer platform” of the relevant Order, in which “she says that they have offended parties” (sons of a septuagenarian person) appeared before him in his office, and “they showed him their citizenship cards” and gave him a power of attorney.

However, the court found it proven that they never contacted a lawyer, “never signed anything,” and that they never appointed their mother “as their lawyer, never asked for or received a loan.” “from the couple “any amount, no pledged share in their favor.”

For a group of judges, the signatures on the “power of attorney” as belonging to the injured parties were “preliminarily affixed” by the mother.

The court described three other situations in which a woman served as the “attorney-in-fact” for the children and one as the “attorney-in-fact” for the parents, and in all of them, these family members received no credit. from third parties, and also did not pledge shares.

And although the lawyer drew up a certified form to verify the authenticity of the power of attorney for documents and the corresponding signatures, none of the family members of the seventy-year-old came to the lawyer’s office, the court found.

According to the court, the seventy-year-old woman, already convicted of qualified fraud and forgery, acted with the goal of “using false documents, the criminal origin of which she concealed, to obtain for herself economic benefits to which she had no right.” at the expense of the assets of family members, “through a deception that she herself created into believing that she acted on their behalf and on their instructions, making the assets transferred to her her own and which she included in her assets.”

However, according to the ruling, the defendants were fully aware that if the lawyer had intervened, “the authentication conditions she fulfilled would have turned the documents called “powers of attorney” into genuine documents (…), giving them public confidence”. as to their veracity of signatures,” which they knew were “false, because they were affixed” by an old man of seventy.