Lisbon's Juízo Central Criminal Suspends Ricardo Salgado's 13-Year Cúmulo Jurídico Sentence on Alzheimer's Incapacity — Combined Operação Marquês and EDP/Manuel Pinho Penalty Holds in Abeyance Until the Clinical State Lifts

The Juízo Central Criminal de Lisboa (Lisbon Central Criminal Court) on Tuesday 2 June ruled to suspend the execution of the consolidated 13-year prison sentence imposed on Ricardo Salgado, the 81-year-old former president of Banco Espírito Santo (BES) and Grupo Espírito Santo (GES). The court fixed a cúmulo jurídico (legal aggregation) of two earlier convictions and ordered the resulting penalty held in abeyance until — and unless — his clinical condition materially improves.

The two source sentences were an eight-year term handed down in the EDP/Manuel Pinho corruption file and a six-year-and-three-month term in the separate Operação Marquês (Operation Marquis) proceeding. The single combined sentence, calculated at 13 years, will not be served. Presiding judge Ana Paula Rosa — the same magistrate who in June 2024 condemned the former banker for active corruption of the former Economy Minister and money laundering — read the ruling on Tuesday afternoon, anchoring the suspension on the most recent court-ordered psychiatric evaluation. That perícia médica (medical examination) concluded that Salgado, who has Alzheimer's disease, can no longer comprehend the penalty applied to him.

Citing the evaluation directly, the judge stated that 'it results unquestionably that Ricardo Salgado suffers from psychiatric anomaly after the practice of the crimes and that the dangerousness of the defendant for further practice is non-existent.' The operative order is to 'suspend the penalty applied to Ricardo Salgado for the period of 13 years or until the clinical state of the defendant ceases.' The structure means any future material improvement in Salgado's capacity to understand the sentence could, in principle, reactivate execution.

The decision was not a surprise. At the prior week's hearing, the Ministério Público (Public Prosecutor's Office) had already accepted the conclusions of the psychiatric report and requested non-execution. Procurador Rui Batista — speaking for the prosecution — told the court that 'the penalty is useless and would be contrary to the values of penal law. And that is what the examination confirms,' and pointed to a cúmulo jurídico in the 10-to-11-year band before adding that 'confirming an incapacity to comprehend the value of the penalty, the objectives of the criminal action are clearly frustrated.' Salgado's defence team — Francisco Proença de Carvalho and Adriano Squilacce, who have represented the former banker for more than a decade — endorsed the prosecution's reading and characterised the tribunal's position as a 'decisão fácil' (easy decision).

The 13-year aggregate now suspended is the headline criminal liability flowing from the post-2014 collapse of GES, the 2014 resolution of BES, and the long-running political-economic investigations that grew out of it. Operação Marquês — the umbrella prosecution that started at Aeroporto Humberto Delgado in November 2014 with the detention of former Prime Minister José Sócrates — had already produced its first-instance verdicts in 2024 and 2025. With Tuesday's ruling, the most senior banking figure from the BES era will not enter prison absent a clinical reversal that medical examiners currently rate as unlikely.