Évora Prosecutors Send Two Men and a Spanish Company to Trial Over Workers Lured to Elvas, and Ask the Court for 324,000 Euros of the Proceeds

The Ministério Público (Public Prosecution Service) has charged two foreign nationals, aged 42 and 32, and a company with its head office in Spain, over a scheme that brought workers from Algeria and Morocco into Portugal on the promise of jobs the prosecutors say were never going to exist. The charges were announced on Tuesday by the DIAP Regional de Évora, the regional criminal investigation department for the Alentejo, and they carry a financial claim: prosecutors have asked the court to strip the defendants of more than 324,000 euros in proceeds.

The two offences are auxílio à imigração ilegal (aiding illegal immigration) and angariação de mão-de-obra ilegal (recruitment of illegal labour). According to the prosecution's own account, the activity was international in character and organised "to bring in and exploit the labour of people originating from various countries, such as Algeria and Morocco". The defendants are said to have repeatedly promoted the entry into Portugal of foreign nationals in an irregular situation, enticing them into the country in order to place them illicitly in the labour market, with the intention of obtaining an economic benefit.

The mechanism described is a promise. The defendants made offers of work "with satisfactory working conditions and which would allow them to support themselves in national territory", and on that basis persuaded the workers to labour at their direction. What never followed, the prosecution says, was any intention of signing the employment contracts that would have let those workers regularise their documents. The conduct is dated to between October 2021 and January 2022, in the territorial area of Elvas, the border town on the road into Spain. The Polícia Judiciária's Southern Directorate assisted the investigation, and the file is numbered 274/21.3GFELV.

What the Law Says

Both offences sit in Lei 23/2007, the statute governing entry, stay, departure and removal of foreign nationals. Article 183 punishes anyone who favours or facilitates the illegal entry or transit of a foreign national with up to three years in prison. Where the same conduct is carried out with a profit motive, and covers illegal residence as well as entry and transit, the range rises to one to five years. If the person is transported or kept in inhuman or degrading conditions, it becomes two to eight years.

Article 185, the recruitment offence, reaches the intermediary rather than the employer. It punishes anyone who, with intent to profit, entices or recruits foreign nationals holding no residence permit or work-authorising visa, in order to introduce them into the labour market. The penalty is one to five years, rising to two to six where the acts are repeated.

The Spanish company is charged in its own right. Article 182 makes legal persons criminally responsible, and a company convicted under article 183 faces a fine at double the ordinary limits or a ban on its activity for one to five years. The same article adds a civil liability that is easy to overlook: those convicted must also pay the costs of the stay and removal of the foreign nationals involved. The 324,000 euro figure is not a fine but a request for forfeiture of the advantages obtained, aimed at the money rather than the person.

A period now runs in which any defendant may request instrução, the optional judicial review stage between charge and trial. If none does, the file goes straight to trial. Nothing has been tested in court and all three defendants are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

The case follows a run of Alentejo prosecutions built on the same pattern. In April, police dismantled a labour trafficking ring that exploited more than a thousand migrant workers; in March a Beja court delivered its verdict in a major trafficking case; and in August, thirty-one foreign farm workers were found sleeping in a Bombarral agricultural shed.