Six clients of Caixa de Crédito Agrícola had “total confidence” in deputy bank manager
A former deputy bank manager of the Caixa de Crédito Agrícola in Cartaxo (Alentejo) is being tried in his absence for having ‘diverted’ around €576,000 from various client accounts (to his own) before fleeing to Brazil as the scam was detected.
This is the second such case in a matter of months – but in the first, the bank employee’s ‘solution’ was to drive over a cliff with her immediate family in the car with her.
In this case, the 46-year-old male employee “has still not been found by authorities” – hence his trial in absentia at Santarém court.
The missing defendant is accused of a total of 18 crimes: six for qualified fraud, seven for the falsification of documents, another six for the emission of a cheque without provision and one for false IT information.
According to prosecutors, the banker acted in two ways, between 2016 and 2019: he made direct transfers from the accounts of the six clients to a business account created by him (SNC Empreendimentos Agroturisticos), and he forged cash withdrawal orders among the papers he gave to clients to sign, withdrawing money (in the normal way) and keeping it.
He managed to siphon off more than half a million euros from the accounts of six clients, all of whom had total trust in him, stress reports. Worst affected was a couple from whom the defendant managed to take more than €360,000 through 54 cash withdrawal orders.
The former manager is also accused of defrauding a woman in the purchase of a property in the same of his company by passing cheques to the tune of €118,000 which then bounced.
Reports in the press today say nothing of whether Caixa de Crédito Agrícola has compensated their clients for these ‘swindles’. Certainly in the case of a bank employee in Ericeira, compensation has been fraught with issues, not least the fact that some signatures were ‘so close to the real thing’ that the bank did not believe they weren’t… In this case, it sounds as if the signatures fraudulently achieved were, in fact, otherwise authentic, which may complicate any kind of settlement even further.
