Manuel Serrão seen as “principal mentor of fraudulent scheme”
Operation Maestro burst over media screens and pages yesterday – shocking Portuguese citizens with yet another suspected corruption scandal involving the country’s movers and shakers.
Leader writers have wasted no time in remarking that this new probe simply highlights “an old Portuguese illness with community funding, in spite of a degree of negationism by political leaders”.
The situation also plays brilliantly into the hands of CHEGA – the party that led its campaign on the eradication of corruption, with the slogan: “Portugal needs a clean-up”.
Today, Expresso has covered some of the ‘background details’ of this investigation, suggesting that public prosecutors suspect textile businessman and regular television commentator Manuel Serrão may have been living at the Sheraton Hotel in Porto between 2015 and 2023 on the back of European funds.
Serrão resided permanently at the Sheraton during the eight years in question, says the paper – adding that “what at the outset would appear to be an extravagance of one who could pay a minimum of €100 a night for 3,000 nights has been considered suspicious” by investigators who undertook the 78 searches throughout the country yesterday.
“According to documents to which Expresso has had access, the northern businessman will have paid for his accommodation with money received from the European funds now under investigation”.
Expresso says Serrão will have paid in an “indirect form, through the emission of false receipts and the circulation of funds.
“Public prosecutors also suspect that part of these expenses (at the Sheraton) were “masked” in projects run by Selectiva Moda – Serrão’s own company, also part of the investigation.
The way this appears to have worked owes to the hotel “itself” being a supplier to Selectiva Moda “as part of operations under the internationalisation scheme” from which Selectiva Moda would benefit, “with an expense of almost €400,000”.
Clearly, all this has to be proved against potential defence claims that this was simply the way of doing business (a claim popular in probes of suspected institutional corruption), but it has sent commentators to their keyboards – particularly as there is the ‘whiff of suspicion’ surrounding the possible ‘diversion’ of PRR (plan for recovery and resilience) funds as well.
Correio da Manhã’s deputy editorial director Eduardo Dâmaso remarks that the warnings of the past made by public prosecutors, the Accounts Court, Transparency International and even the PJ, with regard to misuse of public funding seem to have been too easily ignored.
“The idea that the execution of the PRR is unthinkable could be a dangerous illusion”, he adds – referring to the fact the cases at the European Prosecutor’s Office have increased over the years…
Equally, frauds involving the misuse of community funding are regulated in this country by a law dating back to 1984 – which is an era when Portugal was not even a member of the European Union.
“This is a terrible sign”, says Dâmaso, signing off that one can only hope Maestro is not “the tip of (a new) iceberg” that will call into question political responsibility of the recent past.
Meantime, the other ‘well known figure’ cited in Maestro yesterday, TVI news anchor José Magalhães, has suspended his media contract ‘voluntarily’. Expresso confirms Magalhães is seen as an alleged accomplice of Manuel Serrão.
