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The Government provided false information to the Council of the European Union to justify the election of the European prosecutor José Guerra instead of Ana Carla Almeida, who had obtained first place in the competition organized by an international committee of experts with criteria common to the different countries . Portugal was one of the three countries that did not accept the decision of the International Selection Committee and submitted another name, claiming greater competition. The case had already sparked controversy and is now being thickened by the information, advanced by SIC and Expresso, that the Government provided false curricular data in a letter sent to the Secretary General of the Council of the European Union.
It is a letter, to which SIC and Expresso had access, sent through the Portuguese ambassador to the EU to the EU Council in November last year, where the Government refers to José Guerra as “Deputy Attorney General” . , the highest category of the Public Ministry, which José Guerra has not yet reached. José Guerra is just a prosecutor and therefore a little lower in the hierarchy. According to SIC, the reference to this function is repeated six times throughout the letter.
The Portuguese magistrate José Guerra appointed member of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office
Furthermore, in the letter in which the Government seeks to explain why José Guerra is “without a doubt the most qualified” of the three candidates (sent already after the Committee put Ana Carla Almeida in the first place), the Executive praises the work of the magistrate. in Portugal, but with factual inaccuracies. First, it says that the Prosecutor’s Office directed section 9 of the DIAP, identifying it as the largest national agency for combating economic and financial crime, when, in reality, it is the DCIAP that investigates the most complex cases of this type of crime – and there is José Guerra never worked.
More: the document, according to SIC reports, states that José Guerra led the investigation and prosecution in the so-called UGT process, a case with more than 20 years that involved Torres Couto, but the UGT process was actually investigated by others three prosecutors. José Guerra was the only magistrate who was present at the trial, and was not behind the accusation, as confirmed by the SIC itself.
Contacted by SIC, José Guerra says that inaccurate factual references must be “lapses”; He says that he had nothing to do with the letter sent by the Government to the EU, and guarantees that these references do not take anything away from his public CV. The also Minister of Justice, Francisca Van Dunem, refused to confirm or deny the SIC a process that is “of a reserved nature”, and reiterates that José Guerra has the best profile for the position.
Francisca Van Dunem also guarantees, according to Expresso, that in another “letter she sent to the selection committee” she added “the respective CVs, that is, that of the Attorney General of the Republic dr. José Guerra, which contains his exact functional category and, well, his precise functional trajectory, and it was based on this document that the public prosecutor dr. José Guerra was evaluated and, finally, appointed by the European Council as a European national prosecutor ”.
Appointment of European prosecutors. Government responds to Poiares Maduro
The appointment of José Guerra had already made the news when a group of national and international personalities, among which was the former PSD minister Miguel Poiares Maduro and the former member of the European Parliament and founder of Livre Rui Tavares, signed an open letter criticizing the process nomination. European prosecutors representing each Member State. At that time, the signatories of the letter asked the European Parliament to bring an action before the Court of Justice of the European Union to have the case dismissed.
The Ministry of Justice, at that time, responded to the authors of the letter, in particular the former Social Democratic minister, saying that the name chosen by the Superior Council for the Public Ministry had “curricular superiority” over the name chosen by European criteria (including underlining that the criteria were not binding), and attacking Poiares Maduro for the “political guerrilla maneuver.”
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