The 53-year-old Madeiran lawyer who embezzled 840 thousand euros from foreign clients who invested in three real estate deals in Madeira was sentenced, this afternoon, at the Central Criminal Judge of Funchal, to five years in prison with a suspended sentence.
The panel of judges chaired by Carla Meneses proved the facts contained in the accusation, but also the defendant’s effort to repair the harm done.
At the beginning of his trial, on April 4, 2024, the defendant was accused of three qualified crimes of breach of trust and stated that “there were three improvident acts” and that he proceeded “in a completely wrong way”.
On that same day, the lawyer justified the diversion of funds that had been allocated to him by clients with personal financial difficulties, particularly due to a problem that occurred in 2009, when he ended a law firm in a litigious manner with the other partner and with “huge debts to Banif of almost 100 thousand euros”.
As DIÁRIO reported in the printed edition of April 5, 2024, the defendant reported that he restarted his law practice “with great difficulties” and that “debt problems began to pile up”. In addition, he had a credit card debt of 25 thousand euros. But the situation worsened when Banif went bankrupt in 2014, and from then on “it became a snowball”, he reported.
He thus left a family fund based in California (USA) without 247 thousand euros which were intended to purchase an urban building in Prazeres, a German family without 233 thousand euros which were intended to purchase a house on the site of Fajã, in Arco da Calheta, and an investor residing in the United States without 360 thousand euros who was supposed to buy land on the Ribeiro Seco site, in São Gonçalo.
The defendant ended up reaching an agreement with two of them to pay those sums in monthly installments of one thousand euros each. There was no agreement with the third party.