The lawyer for the president of the Calheta Municipal Council said today, as he left the Palace of Justice, after the coercive measures applied by the investigating judge, Susana Mão de Ferro, were known, that the Ab Initio process (a Latin expression that in Portuguese means “from the beginning”) “will be longer” and that it will involve more than the eight known detainees.
“It is obvious that it will be a long process, because there are not just these eight defendants, right? There are a series of suspects who, in the end, will be, perhaps, I would say, around 20 defendants, roughly,” said João Nabais, leaving the court.
These defendants “will now be called, little by little, and the investigation continues”.
Nabais revealed that among the suspects not yet identified are people “linked to the Government”, but not other mayors. He added that these defendants will already know that they are suspects in the process.
The lawyer also said that the investigation into the Ab Initio process began in Madeira “and then moved to Lisbon, to the DIAP in Lisbon”, and rejected “conspiracy theories against Madeira”.
“I don’t believe that conspiracy theories can be formulated that Lisbon wants to harm Madeira or anything like that,” he said, in response to a question about the cases being investigated from the mainland.
João Nabais also confirmed that the process begins with an “anonymous complaint”. “The first page of the process is an anonymous complaint, it’s true”, he said, adding that the evidence includes “telephone interceptions, police reports, accounting elements, etc. The usual”.
On the other hand, Nabais did not confirm that one million euros are at the heart of the case. “I have no idea if it is one million euros. I would say that the overwhelming majority of the big competitions in this case are gifts, t-shirts, advertising material,” he said.