Lisbon councillor Nuno Pardal Ribeiro resigns mandate, saying he is innocent
CHEGA councillor for Lisbon Nuno Pardal Ribeiro has been accused by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of two crimes of aggravated prostitution of a minor.
He has resigned his mandate, “to preserve the image of the party” – which has taken a battering recently following revelations that one of its MPs is suspected of having stolen as many as 17 suitcases from airport carousels.
In statements to Lusa news agency, Ribeiro confirmed the news that he is accused of aggravated prostitution of a minor, as reported by Expresso newspaper.
His decision to resign from Lisbon local government is also so that he can “calmly handle (his) defence and demonstrate that (he is) innocent,” he said.
“The only thing I can tell you is that the facts that are described, some of them, that is, the most serious ones, do not correspond to the truth”.
Unhelpfully, this is very much the same discourse used by Miguel Arruda when he was first confronted with suspicions that he had been stealing fellow airline passengers’ suitcases.
He too referred to accounts not corresponding to the truth, without providing further details – and today Lusa claims Ribeiro has “refused to provide further details, since he only had access to the process, including the public prosecutor’s accusation, on Wednesday”.
51-year-old Ribeiro insists, however: “At this moment, the accusation, what I am accused of, does not correspond to the truth”.
Nuno Pardal Ribero has already contacted the leader of the CHEGA municipal group, Bruno Mascarenhas, and the party’s national leadership, chaired by André Ventura: “I transmitted the facts, as is logical, and said what I was going to do”, he told Lusa.
“I don’t want to implicate the party in any of this, because this is not a political problem, it is a personal problem and, therefore, as a citizen, I logically have the right to my defence and to my presumption of innocence,” he said.
According to Expresso, the two crimes of aggravated prostitution of minors were allegedly committed against a 15-year-old boy, whom Ribeiro met on Grindr – a dating and meeting online app predominantly used by gay and bisexual men, as well as the trans and queer community.
“The defendant knew that the (boy) was 15 years old and sexually inexperienced”, Expresso quotes prosecutor Manuel dos Santos, from the Department of Investigation and Criminal Action (DIAP) of Cascais, suggesting that Ribeiro performed oral sex with the minor and, at the end, sent a code through MBWay so that the teenager could withdraw €20.
The case was reported to PJ Judicial Police by the boy’s parents after they accessed WhatsApp messages on their son’s mobile phone.
Lusa says it has sought to question Lisbon’s CHEGA municipal group, but that this “has forwarded a position to the party’s national leadership”.
In a follow up story, Expresso adds that Ribeiro has not denied meeting with the adolescent, “but says he did not know he was underage”.
However this latest blow to the party develops, it comes at a hugely sensitive time, with municipal elections on the horizon (in which CHEGA will be hoping to make significant gains) and when party leader André Ventura has declared he intends to run for President of the Republic.
