An Hour-Long Statement Read From a Script Sends the W52 Doping Case Back to Penafiel, the Porto Appeal Court Rules
Former sporting director Nuno Ribeiro read his account aloud in 2024. The appeal court calls that inadmissible evidence, orders the hearing reopened and tells the trial court to rewrite the parts of its verdict that rested on it.
The Court of Appeal in Porto has ordered part of the doping trial of the former W52-FC Porto cycling team to be heard again, ruling that a key account against the team came into evidence illegally: its author read it out in court from a prepared text.
The ruling by the Tribunal da Relação do Porto, dated Thursday and seen by the Lusa news agency on Friday, orders the Penafiel court to reopen the hearing and rewrite its judgment in the "Prova Limpa" (Clean Test) case, in which the team's owner and its sporting director were sentenced last December to prison terms that were not suspended.
An hour-long reading
The problem lies in the hearing of 18 November 2024. That day the team's former sporting director, Nuno Ribeiro, winner of the 2003 Volta a Portugal, spoke at the trial for the first time. He asked to do so in the absence of the other defendants, saying he had been under pressure and threats, and was allowed to give his version by reading a document. The reading took almost an hour.
In it he admitted there had been doping all year round in the team, financed and encouraged by its owner, Adriano Teixeira de Sousa, known as Adriano Quintanilha, whom he called a "master of manipulation" who "wanted to win at all costs". Ribeiro denied being the brains of the scheme, attributing that role to Quintanilha, and said his only mistake had been knowing what was going on and failing to say no because he depended on the job.
Quintanilha and the Associação Calvário Várzea Clube de Ciclismo, the club behind the team, appealed, arguing that a statement read from a prepared script is not lawful evidence. The appeal court agreed.
"We take it as unquestionable that statements given by reading a previously prepared text, drawn up in a manner and by a person unknown, are inadmissible and cannot be valued as such," the ruling says. It finds that the first-instance court "not only admitted them but, on the basis of them, ordered other evidence to be produced and, in the end, relied on them to establish facts decisive to the criminal liability" of the defendants. The Penafiel court, it says, accepted the reading "uncritically", even against co-defendants, "without the slightest concern to clarify in what circumstances and by whom it had been prepared", and should have refused the request.
What happens now
The appeal court orders the hearing reopened so that Ribeiro may, if he chooses, give evidence lawfully, without any written text. The Penafiel court must then reformulate its judgment "in the segments considered tainted", and in any others that depend on them where necessary.
On 12 December 2025 Penafiel sentenced Quintanilha and Ribeiro to four years and nine months in prison each, in a case with 26 defendants. It found that Quintanilha was one of those who "engineered the initial plan" for doping inside the team and had the final word on paying for banned substances and methods. Eleven former riders, among them João Rodrigues, Rui Vinhas and Ricardo Mestre, were convicted of trafficking in prohibited substances and methods and given suspended sentences.
The ruling does not acquit anyone. It sends the case back to the point where the flawed evidence entered it, and leaves the first-instance court to decide what the rest of the evidence proves without it.
