The BES Trial Judge Refuses to Hear 358 Savers Sought by the Swiss Defendants, and Warns of Fines for Stalling
Hearing the witnesses, dropped by prosecutors in June, would have added more than a year. The court now expects to finish its sessions in the Banco Espírito Santo case by July 2027.
The judge presiding over the trial of the collapse of Banco Espírito Santo (BES) and the Espírito Santo Group (GES) has refused a defence bid to call 358 witnesses, most of them savers who lost money when the group fell in 2014. Hearing them would have stretched the trial by more than a year, the newspaper Observador reported on Sunday, citing court documents it had seen.
The request came from the lawyers for two Swiss defendants, Etienne Alexandre Cadosch and Michel Creton, and for Eurofin, the Swiss financial firm that provided services to BES. The public prosecutor's office accuses Eurofin of playing a significant part in hiding the hole in the accounts of the GES and BES under the management of Ricardo Salgado.
How the dispute began
At a hearing on 23 June, the prosecutors told the court they would no longer need the remaining witnesses on their list, including some whose testimony had already been scheduled. That dropped 358 witnesses and sharply sped up the trial.
The witnesses were essentially people who had filed complaints over the group's collapse. The court had already ruled that the civil compensation claims would be dealt with in the ordinary courts, outside the criminal case. According to Observador, the great majority of those savers never dealt with Eurofin; the exception is about 15 witnesses whom the prosecutors had asked to hear.
The Swiss defendants' lawyer, Tiago Rodrigues Bastos, had adopted the prosecution's witnesses as his own, and on 3 July told the court he would not give them up. He was, according to Observador, the only defence lawyer to refuse.
A warning of fines
The presiding judge, Helena Susano, asked the defence on 1 September to explain what evidence it still expected from those witnesses. On 20 September the defence objected to its own witnesses being heard before the prosecution had finished presenting its case, arguing that this breached the defendants' rights. In an order of 23 September the judge rejected that view, called the move a defence "expedient" and warned that the court could fine the defendants under new rules against delaying tactics that took effect on 1 September.
"The applicant defendants have already been warned, more than once and expressly, that delaying expedients would not be tolerated. They are now warned in the same terms, one last time," the judge wrote, adding that any fine would be set at a level suited to the defendants' country of residence and professional status.
The defence hit back on 28 September, arguing that the judge's order was irregular and had not explained why it was useful to change the order in which evidence was heard. It also rejected the suggestion of stalling, pointing to what it called a "spirit of collaboration" throughout the trial. On the same day the judge rejected a separate defence objection to the reading in court of statements given in Switzerland by two witnesses, Marc Radovanovitch and Jean-François Rime.
When the trial could end
With the prosecution's list trimmed, the court is expected to finish its hearing sessions by July 2027, Observador reports. The panel of judges led by Helena Susano will then have to write its ruling in one of Portugal's largest criminal cases.
The BES collapse in August 2014 led to the creation of Novo Banco from the bank's healthy assets. Novo Banco's new French owner has since taken a 7 percent stake in Spain's Sabadell.
