Case centres on “ruse” allegedly devised between Porto cancer hospital and Algarve
Former administrators of Porto IPO (cancer hospital) and Hospital do Algarve, Laranja Pontes and Pedro Nunes, are to be tried for money laundering, economic participation in a business and falsifying a document, damaging those entities by almost €100,000.
According to the indictment seen by Lusa, José Maria Laranja Pontes – who was chairman of the Board of Directors of the Portuguese Oncology Institute of Porto (IPOP) between January 2006 and June 2019, – and Pedro Nunes, chairman of the Board of Directors of the Algarve Hospital Centre (CHUA) from June 2013 to March 2016, “devised a ruse” that consisted of “concluding a loan agreement” between the two organisations “aimed at convincing” IPO Porto doctors to provide services in the Algarve, “with the promise of a salary and allowances higher than those allowed by law”.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office believes that the two defendants and the director of CHUA’s Human Resources Management Service at the time, Rita Carvalho, acted “intending to allow a third person to obtain financial advantages to which they were not entitled”.
The defendants also wanted Pedro Nunes to “benefit from the fulfilment of the goals, objectives and performance of the hospital he managed, knowing full well that this would cause undue economic expenditure for two state-owned companies”.
On February 12, Laranja Pontes and Pedro Nunes will be tried at the S. João Novo Court in Porto for one crime of economic participation in a business, two crimes of document forgery and one crime of money laundering, while Rita Carvalho will be tried for one crime of economic participation in a business and one crime of document forgery.
The indictment states that in 2015 the Algarve Hospital Centre (CHUA) “had a shortage of medical oncologists specialising in radiotherapy” and that to overcome this situation, it could “hire doctors under the general regime for hiring in public functions” or “use the mobility regime for doctors who were working in other public services”.
However, the Public Prosecutor’s Office maintains that Laranja Pontes and Pedro Nunes “agreed among themselves to recruit doctors from IPO Porto to provide services at CHUA without resorting to the rules of those regimes” and “agreed to offer” doctors who accepted “a salary and subsistence allowance higher than that permitted by law”.
To do this, they “created the appearance that the costs would be borne by IPO Porto when CHUA bore them”, and “decided to violate the law and disguise this violation by signing an agreement they called a “transfer agreement” between the two institutions”, which allowed an IPO Porto doctor to work at CHUA, “receiving hourly pay as if it were overtime”.
The doctors in question would also receive “subsistence allowances and transport expenses (…) as if working under a mobility regime”.
The public prosecutor said that this “transfer agreement” allowed one doctor to receive €68,400 as transport, €28,270 as subsistence allowance, €2,703 for the increase in working hours as overtime, totalling €99,014 – of which he has already repaid €3,326.
“The Public Prosecutor’s Office calls for the defendants (…) to be ordered, jointly and severally, to pay the State the sum of €95,687, corresponding to the value of the advantage obtained by the third party through the practice of the typical illegal act,” reads the indictment.
LUSA
