The inspectors of the Judiciary Police (PJ) heard at this Thursday’s session of the trial of the Football Leaks case denied any “strategy tuning” in the meeting with the prosecutor of the Public Ministry (MP) after the beginning of the proceedings in court.
José Amador, who led the investigation, and Hugo Monteiro were again questioned at the Lisbon Central Criminal Court, following a request from the defense of Aníbal Pinto, with a view to clarifying the PJ’s external diligence reports (RDE) on the operation. of surveillance to the meeting in the service area of the A5 motorway, in October 2015, as well as the invitation email for a meeting in September 2020 with the magistrate Marta Viegas.
“I did it without any mental reservation or malice. There is no strategy here. There is a meeting with parties who are, in the context of the investigation, stakeholders and wanted to clarify doubts. I didn’t want to fine tune anything. This email was intended to convene a meeting with the prosecutor of the trial, requested by the prosecutor”, said José Amador.
“No strategy was fine-tuned, questions were answered, which are perfectly normal”, he clarified.
The investigation coordinator of the Football Leaks case – which will continue to be questioned in the afternoon – explained that the procedure of scheduling meetings is normal for the PJ and that “it occurs according to events and situations” in the different processes.
About the meeting, José Amador confirmed the presence of colleagues Rogério Bravo, Paulo Abalada, José Garcia and Hugo Monteiro, in addition to prosecutor Marta Viegas – who assumed that he already knew him before this process -, and said that inspector Aida Freitas was not present. , despite having also been summoned in the aforementioned email. Subsequently, he devalued the importance of the meeting, given the issues of defense of Aníbal Pinto.
“I don’t know how long it lasted. It didn’t really have an agenda. It was an informal meeting. The ‘major’ of the meeting took place without my colleagues, with the exception of my coordinator [Rogério Bravo] and the issues I remember best were related to the forensic report”, he noted, venting: “I seem to be being judged by a content and this has nothing transcendent”.
Hugo Monteiro followed the same line of speech as Amador.
“No strategies were refined. They were technical clarifications”, replied the inspector, when asked by the defense of Aníbal Pinto, who was even targeted by the judge-president Margarida Alves: “You are trying to misrepresent what the inspector said. (…) In terms of allegations, he will draw conclusions».
However, Aníbal Pinto’s defense ended up requiring the extraction of a certificate from the two inspectors for the Public Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the possible practice of crimes of false testimony, false document, abuse of power and breach of duty, with the court granting the two applications against José Amador and Hugo Monteiro.
