Prosecutors Spent Four Hours Inside a Judicial Police Unit, Looking for a Recording Its Director Told a Court Was Never Made
Magistrates, tax inspectors and forensic specialists searched the PJ's technology support unit on Wednesday in the false-testimony inquiry into Carlos Cabreiro. Nobody has been named a suspect, and the Rui Pinto appeal is still pending.
Prosecutors searched a unit of the Polícia Judiciária (Judicial Police, PJ) on Wednesday, in the inquiry opened after a senior officer accused the force's own national director, Carlos Cabreiro, of telling a court that a recording never happened when, the complaint says, it did.
The target was the Unidade de Prevenção e Apoio Tecnológico (Technological Prevention and Support Unit, UPAT), the PJ's technical support unit. RTP reported that the operation took place at the unit's premises in Loures and ended after about four hours.
What the Attorney General's Office confirmed
The Procuradoria-Geral da República (Attorney General's Office, PGR) confirmed the searches in a note carried by Lusa and quoted by Observador. The inquiry is being run by the DIAP Regional de Lisboa (Lisbon Regional Department of Investigation and Prosecution) and concerns possible crimes of abuse of power and aggravated false testimony. According to the note, the searches aimed to gather evidence to confirm or disprove the facts set out in the complaint.
Two details in the note stand out. First, nobody has been made an arguido, the formal suspect status in Portuguese criminal procedure, and the case is under judicial secrecy. Second, the police body assisting the prosecutors was not the PJ itself but the Autoridade Tributária (Tax and Customs Authority). Several magistrates, tax inspectors and computer forensics specialists took part. When the force under investigation is the country's main criminal police, someone else has to carry the evidence bags.
The PJ confirmed in its own statement that procedural steps had taken place at its premises, said it had cooperated fully with the judicial authorities and declined further comment while the investigation continues.
The meeting at the A5 service area
The complaint goes back to the Football Leaks investigation into the hacker Rui Pinto. On 21 October 2015, Aníbal Pinto, the lawyer then acting for Rui Pinto, met Nélio Lucas, chief executive of the investment fund Doyen, and the lawyer Pedro Henriques at a service station on the A5 motorway in Oeiras. That meeting helped investigators identify Rui Pinto.
Cabreiro, who then ran the PJ's cybercrime unit, told the court at the trial that the meeting had not been recorded. The complaint, lodged by the PJ coordinator David Freitas and reported by Lusa, rests on two internal documents, a mission order and an external operations report, that point to a recording having been made. ECO, citing Expresso, reports that prosecutors were looking on Wednesday for the records that would prove it. The recording had been forbidden by the Public Prosecution Service, according to the complaints.
Freitas was moved to UPAT in June last year, which is where he says he found the files. After filing the complaint he was transferred to the PJ's training school and made the subject of disciplinary proceedings. Aníbal Pinto has since filed a complaint of his own against Cabreiro and three inspectors who worked on the case.
When the complaint became public in August, the PJ told Lusa that Cabreiro stood by everything he had said in court and had made no statement that was untrue. That remains his position on the record.
Why it matters beyond the building
We reported on 15 September that the inquiry into the director had been opened. Wednesday's searches move it from a complaint on paper to active evidence-gathering inside the force.
The Rui Pinto file itself is still open. He was acquitted of all 241 counts in his second trial in April, and the prosecution's appeal is pending. How the investigators first reached him is precisely the kind of question an appeal court and defence lawyers will want answered.
ECO also reports that a judge has set 16 October to hear Freitas, four UPAT inspectors and José Amador, the inspector who led the Rui Pinto investigation. For now, the only thing established is that the prosecutors went looking. What they found is covered by judicial secrecy.
