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The Department of Investigation and Criminal Action of Coimbra proposed to close the process of falsification of documents in which the socialist deputy is accused Hortense Martins and his father, Joaquim Martins, in exchange for paying both a thousand euros to the State, reported this Monday the Public newspaper. The fact that the Socialist deputy allegedly resigned from the management of her father’s hotel company is questioned, signing a document that accredited him in 2011, but ended up remaining in office for another two years, until 2013.
Deputy of the PS obtains 276 thousand euros of European funds for the father’s company
According to Public, the order issued by the lawyer Alexandra Alves shows that father and daughter used a document “prepared and signed” by the daughter and “whose content they knew did not correspond to reality, acting with the intention that the exemption be included in it. . Hortense Martins was charged with the management of said company on a date prior to the actual date ”.
Given these proven facts, which occurred to “avoid unfavorable consequences for the accused” in the framework of another process, the accused could incur the crime of document forgery punishable by up to five years in prison. It turns out that, because the falsification is not relevant during the other pending case, the judge considered that the degree of guilt of the deputy was not “particularly high”.
Thus, the judge decreed that the case could be closed with three consequences: the payment of a thousand euros by the accused to the Commission for the Protection of Victims of Crime, the payment of a thousand euros by the father of the deputy, and also the accused , to the Treasury. Public, and the correction of the date of termination of the management of Hortense Martins in the commercial register. The conditions were accepted by both.
The filing of the document forgery process only had this result because, at the same time, the records on the evidence of the practice, by the father and the daughter, of the crime of fraud in obtaining community grants from the Proder (Development Program Rural) through its hotel company Investel.
The cases date back to 2010 and 2013 and involve Hortense Martins, deputy and then leader of the PS district in Castelo Branco; Investel, a company owned by the socialist’s father, of which he was manager at that time (the then falsified document said that he had ceased to be manager in 2011), and owner of Herdade do Regato; Adraces, a regional development association whose executive director António Realinho, an economist since 2018, has served four and a half years in prison for fraud and forgery; and the then mayor of Castelo Branco, Joaquim Mourão, who at that time had councilor Luís Correia – who later held the office of mayor (meanwhile dismissed), and who is married, as he was then, to Hortense Martins.
At stake are the steps taken by these protagonists that will have led, first in 2010, then in 2013, to the allocation of two Proder community funds, amounting to 171 thousand euros and 105 thousand euros, to Investel. The money was used to build a “Gastronomic and Recreational Tourism Center” and a rural tourism unit in Herdade do Regato, a 9-hectare property in Póvoa de Rio de Moinhos, on the outskirts of Castelo Branco.
It turns out that current regulations established that expenses incurred before the application approval date could only be subsidized if “the respective operations” were not completed on that date. And that was what the Public Ministry demanded to close the case.
In April last year, the Observer reported on another case involving the socialist parliamentarian’s hotel society. The fact that the Assembly of the Republic awarded the stay of the deputies of the Environment Commission in Castelo Branco in one of the hotels of Mrs. Hortense Martins’s father was questioned.
The Parliament awards the stay of deputies to a deputy and father’s hotel
The office of the secretary general of Parliament justified the choice, in response to the Observer, claiming that the Assembly of the Republic “chose the cheapest hotel” after the travel agency that works with the Parliament presented two hypotheses.
