It has always been a very odd story: one of Portugal’s top economic diplomats was ‘in the soup’ (according to the nation’s best-read tabloid) for allegedly ‘deviating’ €400,000 from the Portuguese embassy in Berlin.
Quite what Luís Almeida Sampaio was meant to have done with the allegedly deviated funds was never explained.
A disciplinary process saw him receive two sanctions, says Correio da Manhã: a suspension of 150 days and the order to repay “almost €100,000”.
Lawyers acting for Sampaio – now the Portuguese ambassador for NATO – have always maintained the allegations were spurious, and the funds ‘deviated’ more a situation of “formal irregularities and accounting errors”.
This was all simmering in March last year, and since then, not a word – until last weekend, at least, when CM again updated its readers on what has been happening… or not (as it turns out).
Two years after Portugal was singled out by Transparency International as one of the NATO members with a “culture of opacity and secretism” (click here), foreign affairs minister Augusto Santos Silva has ruled that Almeida Sampaio’s sanctions should be lifted.
Thanks to the minister’s decision, Almeida Sampaio has continued to exercise his functions as Portugal’s permanent representative at NATO “and has not had to return money to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs”, adds CM.
The now inexistent sanctions refer to the years 2012-2015 when Almeida Sampaio worked at the Portuguese embassy in Berlin.
During the stint, he was also cited (2014) for being the country’s ‘best economic diplomat’.
CM appears to have tried to get to the bottom of this story, but claims it was simply told that it was up to the Ministry “to decide on disciplinary matters”.
Under article 180 of the law governing work in the public sector, sanctions can be lifted when the “personality of the employee” is “taken into account”, along with “the conditions of his life, his conduct before and after the infraction and the circumstances thereof”. If these are such that a “simple censure of behaviour and the threat of disciplinary sanctions” are considered sufficient, then ‘goodbye sanctions’ – no matter what the deviated money was all about.
UPDATE WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 7:
CM has since carried a “Right of Reply” on its political pages taken up by foreign affairs minister Augusto Santos Silva and saying words to the effect that the entire story is “not true”.
natasha.donn@algarveresident.com
