Two years after clients of Ericeira’s Millennium BCP bank woke up to the fact that their accounts were missing what amounted, all told, to “millions of euros”, public prosecutors are finally investigating.
Pedro Proença, the lawyer for five of the clients, suggests the fraud is actually much larger than newspapers so far have made out – and that it may well include foreigners/ foreign residents among the victims.
Proença also believes there is more to this fraud than the one woman (Raquel Godinho) who drove over a cliff as she took her children to school one morning, killing herself and her mother. (The two children, miraculously, escaped from the car filling up with water and clung to rocks until help arrived.)
The lawyer tells Correio da Manhã that it has now become clear that “many of the victims” did not have their money in accounts managed by Raquel, who is understood to have chosen suicide over explaining her fraud to the bank hierarchy (and for some reason decided to take her immediate family with her).
Proença stresses that his own inquiries this far have shown “there was falsification of signatures en masse” – and in at least one case (which served to withdraw ‘a large amount of money’) the signature on the documents was that of a foreign man, when the account was in the name of a Portuguese woman, resident in Ericeira.
“It is a legible signature”, Proença tells CM, saying the signatory “must have made a mistake (…) but this is what has led us to believe that there are many more victims than initially suggested, some of them being foreign residents”.
And this all feeds into the scenario of a fraud perpetrated by more than just Raquel Godinho.
Said Pedro Proença: “We wait now for public prosecutors to collect all the information, and send the dubious documents to the police scientific laboratory, so that we can understand who Raquel’s accomplices were.
“Our desire is that everything will start developing quickly so that the victims can be reimbursed”, the lawyer added.
This has always been the ‘moot point’ of this terrible story: Millennium BCP has been depicted as always “being vague, and not clarifying any questions raised”, says CM.
A source for the bank is quoted as having told the paper: “On this subject, the Bank does not comment further than reaffirming that all complaints presented and frauds detected are always analysed with maximum rigour, and if it is concluding that the client is correct, even if there has been no complaint, the Bank takes adequate measures to ensure clients are in no way prejudiced”.
This is all very fine, but as CM has explained in the past, some of the signature forgeries were so convincing that the Bank did not accept that the client had not signed the relevant documents. In other words, the Bank did not accept that there had been ‘fraud’.
Equally, to this day, the clients of Raquel have not received a full reimbursement of the amounts they claim to have lost.
Source: Correio da Manhã
