A Gaia Court Called Ten-Year-Old Champions League Trips Morally Censurable, Then Acquitted Everyone Charged Over Them
Eduardo Vitor Rodrigues, mayor of Vila Nova de Gaia for twelve years, was cleared of malfeasance and misappropriation over two municipally funded trips in 2015 and 2016 worth 15,800 euros. The judge called his choices censurable, then called them political.
The Tribunal de Vila Nova de Gaia acquitted Eduardo Vítor Rodrigues on Friday of prevaricação (malfeasance in public office) and peculato (misappropriation of public funds), ending a case built on two trips to Champions League football matches a decade ago. The former deputy mayor Patrocínio Azevedo and the then secretary to the mayor's office, both charged as co-authors of peculato and document forgery, were acquitted as well.
The court found there had been a partnership between the Câmara Municipal de Gaia (Gaia City Council) and the football club FC Porto, run through the PortoGaia foundation, under which the club sent four invitations covering the mayor, the deputy mayor and their wives to Champions League fixtures. A delegation of people with an institutional relationship to the municipality or the foundation usually travelled with them, and the council paid their costs.
The line the court drew
The guest list, the judge said, was the exclusive responsibility of Eduardo Vítor Rodrigues, and the people on it "were not his friends" but representatives of institutions. Rodrigues had told the court the practice predated him and that he never took his daughter, cousins or friends. "Eduardo Vítor Rodrigues's testimony was relevant and corroborated by other elements of proof," the judge said.
Then came the sentence that defines the ruling. The choices the former mayor made were "criticisable and morally censurable", the judge said, but they were no more than political choices. The deputy mayor and the secretary had "confined themselves to following Eduardo Vítor Rodrigues's instructions to pay the delegation's expenses", and it was not proved that they falsified documents or appropriated any sum.
The Ministério Público (Public Prosecution Service) had asked, in closing arguments on 23 June, for four to six years in prison for Rodrigues and suspended sentences for the other two. Its case was that on two occasions, in 2015 and 2016, the mayor authorised municipal spending on third parties' travel to Champions League matches that was recreational rather than institutional, damaging the public purse by more than 15,800 euros.
A different case from Operação Babel
This is not the file that has defined Gaia's politics for the past three years, and the distinction is easy to lose. In May, the same court sentenced Patrocínio Azevedo to eight years and six months for aggravated passive corruption in Operação Babel, the investigation into the alleged manipulation of urban planning decisions in the municipality. Rodrigues has been an arguido in that separate investigation since May 2023, and that branch remains open. Friday's acquittal touches none of it. He led Vila Nova de Gaia for the PS for twelve years, from 2013 until June 2025, when he resigned after a court ordered the loss of his mandate for personal use of a municipal electric vehicle.
The former mayor's answer
He told reporters he could not be satisfied, because for ten years he had carried the suspicion of conduct now shown to be "absolutely legal and ethical". "This decision is not a just decision, because just would have been never to have gone through this," he said. Of the prosecution service: "The Ministério Público is the guarantor of legality, but sometimes it seems to be a kind of hostile agent with a hatred of politicians."
Why this matters beyond Gaia
Portuguese courts have spent this year setting the boundary between political misjudgement and criminal liability at municipal level, and the results have gone both ways. Prosecutors are seeking to remove two Valongo mayors from office over a landfill road ban, and in August they charged Albufeira's mayor with inciting hatred. What is unusual in Friday's ruling is the judge saying openly that conduct can be censurable and still lawful, which is a harder verdict for either side to claim as a win.
The elapsed time is its own finding. The spending happened in 2015 and 2016, the sum at issue was under 16,000 euros, and the verdict landed in September 2026. That gap sits behind the loudest complaint Rodrigues made on Friday, and it is not one only defendants make. The Operação Babel appeals, and whatever the prosecution does with the branch in which Rodrigues is still an arguido, will take their own years, with a different administration running the municipality throughout.
