As part of investigations into alleged corruption crimes in Madeira, the Public Ministry (MP) is investigating an official plane trip that Miguel Albuquerque took with his partner to Curaçao, in the Caribbean, and Venezuela, in 2022.
The tickets for the trip, according to Correio da Manhã, were issued 10 days before the regional government of Madeira approved the hiring of this service and 11 days before the public tender was launched, raising the authorities’ suspicions.
Albuquerque traveled with a delegation of 13 people on the visit, which took place between October 9 and 18, 2022 and cost almost 97 thousand euros (96,836 euros).
The trip was reported to the MP by the Juntos Pelo Povo (JPP) party, due to suspicions of mismanagement of public funds and alleged favoritism of a company linked to Avelino Farinha, one of the main defendants in the case, who was detained.
The suspicious issuance of tickets appears in a report from the Administrative and Fiscal Court of Funchal, from November 2023, which resulted from a complaint by Élvio Sousa, general secretary of the JPP. Only one company presented proposals for services on this trip, Rameventos, which is owned by the company that owns Diário de Notícias da Madeira, linked to Avelino Farinha’s group.
Among the hotels in which Albuquerque and his entourage stayed were the Pestana Amsterdam Riverside, from the Pestana Group, or the Renaissance Resort & Casino By Marriot, in Curaçao.