Total allegedly plundered put at “around €61,000”
Former president of the Order of Nurses, Ana Rita Cavaco, as well as the current president Luís Barreira, among various other members past and present, are to be tried for embezzlement and falsification of documents, in a case centred on mileage allowances, or rather in the words of prosecutors “the undue payment of kilometers, in the form of allowances”.
According to Expresso, a pre-trial judge has agreed that almost all the 13 defendants cited by public prosecutors should be tried, with exception of one, Luís Furtado, the leader of the Order in the Azores.
The criminal case opened following a report by IGAS, the General Inspection of Health Activities which indicated among many other anomalies that, in three months of 2016 (July, August and September), Ana Rita Cavaco received amounts between €3,265- €3,984, which meant that she would have had to travel more than 400 kms during every one of those days.
There are many other examples, cited by the report/ prosecution, which defendants argue followed a “malicious complaint” given oxygen by a television exposé.
But pre-trial judge Ana Rita Loja ruled that she considers there is much more to all this than ‘bad feeling’. She cited, for example, a trip from Lisbon to Ponte de Lima and back (a journey of 784 kms) taken in just two hours in July 2016, and another round trip from Lisbon to Melgaço and back (930 kms) to have been achieved in an hour and 50 minutes, with the claimant managing both lunch and dinner in Lisbon.
Defence lawyers Rui Patrício and Tiago da Costa Andrade insist that they will be able to prove the lack of foundation of all these claims during the trail phase.
At issue is the alleged misappropriation of “around €61,000, in total, by all defendants”, concludes Expresso.
Of this amount, former nursing boss Ana Rita Cavaco is accused of misappropriating around €10,600.
And as to why the case is based on mileage allowances for 2016, this is explained by the fact that the following year “the function allowance was unanimously approved (by the Order) with no further need to forge trips”, writes Expresso. “According to the prosecution, the 2017 and 2018 mileage sheets reflect a lower number of kms travelled”.
Source: LUSA/ Expresso
