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The Anti-Corruption Unit of the Judicial Police is conducting searches this morning against Benfica and senior officials, meet TVI, with special attention to the club’s SAD facilities and the office of the presidency, at gate 18 of the Luz stadium.
President Luís Filipe Vieira is also one of the main objectives of this operation, led by Judge Carlos Alexandre, on suspicion of crimes such as sports corruption. Another suspect is Paulo Gonçalves, Vieira’s former right-hand man at SAD, who left when he was charged in the ‘E-toupeira’ lawsuit but continues to do business with Benfica.
It is about, in the approximately dozens of raids that involve more than 50 PJ inspectors, the collection of information for different processes that are already in the final stretch and where the Public Ministry links the last clues before the charges. Especially that of the ‘mails’, which originated in the public disclosure of information obtained by the ‘hacker’ Rui Pinto; and also that of the ‘blue bag’, on the suspicion that Benfica took 1.8 million euros from SAD accounts in 2018, for payments for computer services that were never provided.
The operation of the PJ is articulated with a team of DCIAP magistrates and is also directed at businessmen, and other intermediaries, who in recent years have had a relationship with Benfica, some of whom have direct links with Luís Filipe Vieira. It is suspected that they have been useful for different schemes, especially sports corruption, that is, through bribes to athletes from opposing clubs, including Marítimo and Rio Ave, to harm their teams on the field in games against him. Benfica.
In the case of Vila do Conde, we were in the 2015/16 season, when Benfica fought hard for the championship against Sporting de Jorge Jesus and Bruno de Carvalho. In the final stretch, in April, it is suspected that the Rio Ave players were recruited to underperform and allow Benfica to win, as it turned out, 1-0. The modus operandi, as reported and he believes that the investigation was repeated in other games, went through promises of contracts for athletes in the following season, with placement in other clubs and salary improvements. It was in this intermediation where the entrepreneurs entered.
This case, from Rio Ave, began to be investigated in Porto, but in the meantime it was transferred to the DCIAP, in Lisbon, where Benfica leaders are investigated from a global perspective, on several fronts, using different schemes that would aim to subvert the truth. sports. That is, by conditioning the performance of the referees, even by controlling the observers who evaluate them. In the case of ‘mails’, it is this procedure that, according to the investigation, is involved in the exchange of electronic correspondence between embodied officials and people in the middle of an arbitration. Encrypted language is used, such as the expression “priests for masses”, used among others by the former BTV official Pedro Guerra, who is understood as “game referees”.
The thousands of emails deleted by Rui Pinto from the Benfica server were obtained illegally, the so-called contaminated evidence, but PJ’s investigation ignored the issue and then most of the information arrived legally, legally validated. The documentary, expert and testimonial evidence is already consolidated, the investigators believe, and both those responsible for Benfica and the club’s own SAD should be subject to formal charges in the coming months.
If the crime of sports corruption is proven, one of the sanctions provided is the reduction of the club’s division.
