Former Espírito Santo Director Tells the Marquês Corruption Trial That Ricardo Salgado "Decided Everything"

A former senior manager inside the collapsed Espírito Santo empire told a Lisbon court this week that Ricardo Salgado, the banker once nicknamed the "DDT" — dono disto tudo, or "owner of all this" — personally made every decision of consequence in the group, and many that were not.

Lourenço Lobo, who served as a director of several Grupo Espírito Santo (Espírito Santo Group, or GES) companies, including the holding company Rioforte, gave evidence on Wednesday in the long-running trial of Operação Marquês (Operation Marquês), the graft case that has shadowed Portuguese public life for more than a decade. He described a financial structure in which authority flowed to a single man at the top.

Lobo recounted that José Castella, the group's financial controller, who died in 2020, would routinely pause before settling any significant question. "He had to ask many times. Everything that was relevant, or even things that weren't," Lobo told the court. "He used to say: I have to ask the boss." The boss, the witness confirmed, was Salgado.

Much of the testimony turned on the mechanics of how GES was run. Lobo described a sprawling web of subsidiaries whose ownership was reviewed and updated regularly, and acknowledged that some employees were paid through one group company while working for another — an arrangement prosecutors have pointed to as evidence of how money and people moved opaquely across the conglomerate before its 2014 collapse brought down Banco Espírito Santo (Espírito Santo Bank, or BES).

The trial centres on former prime minister José Sócrates, the principal defendant, who faces a battery of corruption, money-laundering and document-falsification charges stemming from accusations that he received millions in exchange for favours while in and after office. Sócrates has consistently denied wrongdoing and cast the case as a politically motivated construction by prosecutors.

Salgado is among those standing trial alongside him. The former banker, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, faces eight counts of money laundering and three of active corruption. His deteriorating health has repeatedly complicated proceedings, and judges have had to weigh how far he can meaningfully participate.

Wednesday's session formed part of the witness phase now under way at the Central Criminal Court inside Lisbon's Campus de Justiça (Justice Campus). A succession of former executives, accountants and officials is scheduled to appear through the coming weeks, before the court breaks for its summer recess in mid-July. Their accounts of how GES actually functioned are central to the prosecution's effort to show that decisions attributed to subordinates in fact traced back to Salgado.

Originally opened by investigators in 2014, Operação Marquês spent years mired in pre-trial wrangling, with much of the early case against Sócrates whittled down on appeal before the main trial finally began. For Portuguese readers, the proceedings have become a test of whether the justice system can carry a case of this size to a verdict at all — and the testimony now being heard, witness by witness, is the part that will ultimately decide it.