Appeal Court Sends Former Montepio Chief Tomás Correia to Trial Over a Luanda Office Deal Prosecutors Value at 30.9 Million Euros
A lower court had cleared Tomás Correia and four others in April. The Lisbon Court of Appeal says the facts can amount to breach of trust and money laundering, and that a trial must decide.
Tomás Correia, the former head of the Montepio group, will stand trial for breach of trust and money laundering after all. In a ruling of 23 September, the Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa (Lisbon Court of Appeal) upheld an appeal by the Ministério Público (Public Prosecutor's Office) and overturned an April decision that had spared him and four other defendants a trial. The prosecutors announced the ruling on Friday.
In April, the Tribunal Central de Instrução Criminal (Central Criminal Investigation Court) in Lisbon had decided, at the end of the pre-trial phase known as instrução, not to send the five defendants for trial, with the judge finding that the facts did not amount to a crime. The appeal court says that decision "did not make a correct legal and criminal framing of the facts described in the indictment", and that those facts are capable of meeting the elements of the crimes charged.
Who goes to trial
Besides Correia, who led the Associação Mutualista Montepio Geral (Montepio Geral mutual association) from 2008 to 2019 and its bank, the Caixa Económica Montepio Geral, until 2015, the defendants are two former managers of Finibanco Angola, António Pontes and Luís Almeida. Those three are accused of breach of trust and money laundering. Two businessmen, Paulo Guilherme and Eurico de Brito, are accused of breach of trust, according to reports at the time of the indictment. No trial date has been announced.
The Luanda building at the heart of the case
The case goes back to 2013, when Finibanco Angola was still part of the Montepio group (it was sold in full to Nigeria's Access Bank in 2023). According to the indictment, brought in October 2025 by the regional department of investigation and prosecution (DIAP) in Lisbon, the Angolan bank bought a building in Luanda as its new head office from a property company owned by the family of Paulo Guilherme and his father-in-law Eurico de Brito. Prosecutors say the bank "did not need and never used" the building.
The deal, prosecutors allege, was linked to purchases of participation units in the Caixa Económica Montepio Geral's own participation fund, financed with credit from Finibanco Angola, which in practice brought liquidity to the Portuguese bank. The property purchase served to pay off the loans taken out to buy those units. The indictment puts the loss to Finibanco Angola and the Montepio group at about 35.9 million US dollars, roughly 30.9 million euros at the October 2025 exchange rate.
The appeal court found that the directors of Finibanco Angola and of the Caixa Económica Montepio Geral, by virtue of their posts, had the power to manage and dispose of the institutions' money. Using those funds in operations designed, according to the indictment, "to artificially ensure the subscription of participation units and to finance interests alien to those of the institution" could amount to appropriation for the purposes of the crime of breach of trust, the court said. The indictment, it added, describes concrete facts capable of showing that the bank's funds were used against the purpose for which they had been entrusted, and a common plan among the defendants, "a matter that must be assessed at trial".
The court ordered a new decision committing the five defendants for trial on the crimes charged. The investigation was opened about a decade ago. The developer José Guilherme, Paulo Guilherme's father, was one of its main suspects, but proceedings against him ended when he died in August 2024.
The ruling is a reversal for Correia and the other four defendants, who are presumed innocent, and the question of whether the Luanda deal was a crime will now be settled by a trial court.
