Call it a criminal’s dream scenario.
A former top bank manager in Portugal convicted of fraud in connection with a $20 million art deal struck more than 20 years ago has walked away unscathed.
The reason? Amid legal wrangling and bureaucracy over which court had the power to prosecute him, the deadline to send him to jail simply expired.
The banker in question is José Viamonte de Sousa, former director general of the private banking department of Banco Português de Negócios (BPN, the Portuguese business bank). Around 2001, according to reports, the bank acquired 41 paintings by Joan Miró for 17 million euros (now $19 million). However, the painting’s sellers only received 5.1 million euros ($5.6 million) of that amount. The remaining 12 million euros ($13.2 million) would have been distributed as “commissions” and shared by several people.
According to a report, Viamonte de Sousa relied on various companies and several Spanish intermediaries, one of whom was an art dealer, to funnel the money. The funds first went through a company called Negotrade, which came to mediate the negotiations between the owners of the collection and BPN. To make the payment, an offshore company was used, Zevin-Holdings, owned by Marazion Holdings, itself owned by BPN.
Another report states that more than 2 million euros ($2.2 million) was transferred to an account at Millennium BCP Bank and Trust, based in the Cayman Islands and held by Index Sl, “which he did not it was not possible to determine the final beneficiaries”. In the end, Viamonte de Sousa reportedly kept a total of 1.25 million euros ($1.3 million) for himself.
None of the people mentioned in the reports could be reached for comment. Emails sent to the Portuguese Ministry of Justice did not elicit a response.
In 2021, Viamonte de Sousa was sentenced to seven years and 10 months in prison by Judge Pedro Brito, in the Court of São João de Novo de Porto, for fraud and money laundering.
The banker remained free while appealing the decision. At the end of that year, the vice-president of the Porto Court of Appeal, Maria Dolores de Sousa, reduced his prison sentence to six and a half years.
However, she “ignored the indication of the statute of limitations contained in the trial – suspended until June 3, 2022 – and admitted an appeal to the Supreme Court of Justice”, according to a report.
Several months later, due to bureaucracy, the case reportedly bounced back and forth between the appeals court and the original court that handed down the guilty verdict. In the end, “the entire case did not come to the trial court until March 16” of this year – “at which time it was declared ‘extinct’ and the case was archived,” according to the Portuguese newspaper. Correio da Manha.
At that time, Judge Brito ruled that the upper limit for prosecuting a crime of qualified fraud had already been reached.
The Portuguese outlet added: “José Viamonte de Sousa hasn’t had to return a ‘centimo’ of the money he embezzled (in his own way) almost 20 years ago, and he doesn’t definitely won’t go to jail.”
BPN was nationalized in 2008 after a criminal investigation for fraud and money laundering.
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