It could be a serious setback to the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s investigation into the EDP case, which has been ongoing for 12 years and has António Mexia and Manso Neto as its main defendants: an investigating judge upheld the suspects’ claims and ordered the destruction of 3,277 e-mails seized in electrical searches that could be crucial for investigators, reported the Express and confirmed PÚBLICO.
At issue are a set of email messages seized by the authorities, in 2017, in the boxes of two then administrators of the EDP group who are suspected of having corrupted the Minister of Economy Manuel Pinho and a Secretary of State. That day there was a search at the EDP headquarters for which there was a warrant from a judge, but at the scene the prosecutors realized that there could be emails older ones at another address, and this new search was carried out that same day but only with an order from the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The prosecutors justified the option with the serious risk of messages being deleted by suspects. However, in the opinion of judge Nuno Costa, this transforms the exchange of messages into prohibited evidence.
But not everything was a victory for the defenses. Nuno Costa rejected a request from Mexia and Manso Neto’s lawyer who, in response to this problem, asked that all emails seized in the case – which constitute the main evidence of this investigation – and of which the clients were holders were also destroyed. The judge rejected the request, considering that the claim was vague and little fulfilled.
As for the emails that the judge ordered to be destroyed, the prosecutors from the Central Department of Investigation and Criminal Action (DCIAP) tried to convince the courts where the defendants’ resources have been handled that EDP voluntarily handed over this correspondence to them, but without success. It is not easy to assess the importance of this specific set of emailswho were selected through the reference “Artur Trindade”, another of the defendants in this case, who is in the final stretch.
“Contrary to what the Public Prosecutor’s Office claims, there was no voluntary handover of the emailsas it was precisely a seizure that occurred”, writes investigating judge Nuno Costa in a decision dated this Wednesday, drawing conclusions from a ruling by the Supreme Court of J