A Lisbon Court Acquits Ricardo Salgado and Seven Others in the Banco do Brasil Bribery Case
The Central Criminal Court of Lisbon has acquitted former Banco Espirito Santo chief Ricardo Salgado and seven co-defendants of paying bribes to secure BES financing, finding no evidence to sustain the charges. Prosecutors had alleged roughly $1.8 million was routed to a Banco do Brasil vice-preside
A Lisbon court has acquitted Ricardo Salgado, the former head of Banco Espírito Santo (BES), and seven co-defendants in a long-running case that accused them of paying bribes to secure financing for the bank before it collapsed. The Juízo Central Criminal de Lisboa (Central Criminal Court of Lisbon), sitting at the Campus de Justiça in the capital, ruled on Monday that there was no evidence to sustain the charges.
The verdict clears the eight accused of alleged corruption harmful to international trade, money laundering and related offences. “The judges considered there was no proof,” the court found, closing a chapter of a prosecution that had run for more than a year.
What the case was about
The Ministério Público (Public Prosecutor’s Office) alleged that Salgado orchestrated the payment of roughly 1.8 million US dollars to Allan Simões Toledo, at the time a vice-president of Banco do Brasil, between 2011 and 2014. The money, prosecutors said, moved through offshore entities and was intended to smooth a 200-million-dollar financing line for BES from the Brazilian state-owned bank. The Banco do Brasil executive was not a defendant in the Portuguese proceeding.
Salgado, once one of the most powerful figures in Portuguese finance and nicknamed “o Dono Disto Tudo” (the owner of all this), was excused from attending the trial because of Alzheimer’s disease. The hearings had opened on 20 May 2025.
Why BES still matters
Banco Espírito Santo was one of Portugal’s largest private banks until it imploded in August 2014, when the Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal) split it into a “good bank”, Novo Banco, and a toxic remainder that wiped out shareholders and many bondholders. The failure cost thousands of ordinary savers their money and became the defining financial scandal of the decade, spawning a web of criminal investigations that have moved slowly through the courts ever since.
This acquittal is only one strand of that web. Salgado has faced several separate proceedings, including the sprawling “Universo Espírito Santo” case, and his declining health has repeatedly complicated efforts to bring the matters to a close. Monday’s ruling does not touch those other cases.
What happens next
The decision is not necessarily final. The Public Prosecutor’s Office may appeal to a higher court, as it has in other Espírito Santo matters, which could keep the Banco do Brasil allegations alive for months yet. For now, though, the eight defendants walk free of these particular charges.
For residents watching Portugal’s long reckoning with the 2014 banking collapse, the outcome is a reminder of how hard financial-crime cases are to prove — and how much of the BES story, more than a decade on, remains unresolved in the country’s courtrooms.
