António Manuel Góis, a former employee of the Commercial Registry Office of Funchal, accused of embezzling two million euros in revenue from this public service, was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. The reading of the ruling by Judge Joana Dias took place this afternoon, in the Funchal court (Building 2000). The panel of judges found the crimes of embezzlement and document forgery to have been proven. The defendant’s lawyer has already announced that he will appeal this decision.
As reported by DIÁRIO in today’s print edition, this was the third trial in the same case. In the two previous trials, concluded in April 2018 and July 2022, António Manuel Góis was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for the crimes of embezzlement and document forgery. In both cases, the defendant appealed and managed to have the judgments annulled due to errors by the judges.
The case, which began with a complaint in 2010, has been dragging on in the courts for so long that it was considered that the statute of limitations for the crime of forgery may have expired, and the defendant’s first lawyer, Arnaldo Matos, has passed away. It will not be easy to find a case in the Portuguese justice system with such a tortuous path as this one. The former civil servant, who was once mayor of Ponta do Sol and the Pontassolense football club, was reported to the Public Prosecutor’s Office in May 2010, after the misappropriation of large sums of money and the falsification of revenue registration documents in that service overseen by the Regional Government were detected. The PJ took three years to conclude the investigation, half of which was spent waiting for a report from Lisbon. Then, the public prosecutor Diogo Neves delayed the investigation for almost two years, repeating inquiries that had already been carried out. The case only moved forward after the superior, prosecutor Isabel Dias, took charge of the case in February 2015 and concluded the indictment in eleven months. António Manuel was charged with one crime of embezzlement and 143 crimes of forgery and money laundering. His parents were also charged with money laundering, because part of the embezzled funds allegedly passed through their accounts. The main defendant requested the opening of an investigation, a phase that lasted for 11 months. In the end, an apparent oversight by the judge caused the crime of money laundering (the most serious, punishable by up to 12 years in prison) to disappear in relation to António Manuel Góis, but it remained in relation to his parents. His father died before the trial and his mother was acquitted.