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It was shortly after 9:00 am on Thursday when 30 inspectors of the Judicial Police (PJ) and two magistrates broke into the Vila Verde City Hall building with search warrants in hand and bad news: all the autarky action was now paralyzed to analyze documents related to public procurement.
In the sights of the PJ were the contracts signed by the autarky with companies associated with five mayors of the Board of that municipality, and they presented notices of apprehension of those same contracts. This action ended up forcing them to postpone the meeting of councilors with the mayor, António Vilela, as well as to cancel other schedules scheduled for today.
As the author of these lines wrote, in 2018, in the Weekly V, the presumed presidents of the Board Carlos Cação (UF Vade), Vitor Mota (Esqueiros, Nevogilde and Travassós), Vítor Ramos (Turiz), Joaquim Martins (Valbom and Passô) and Carlos Ferraz (UF Vilarinho, Sande, Barros and Gomide) They even negotiated directly with the municipality, but, before the last municipal elections of 2017, they ended up deviating from the official data because they incurred a loss of mandate.
It is these contracts that are in the sights of this investigation by the authorities, who want to understand if everything was done within the legal framework or if there is a possibility of crime, since it was (and is) public that those who actually manage these firms they are the mayors themselves, who, in 2020, will continue to enter into contracts with the municipality.
He founded a company before the elections and passed it on to his sister
Vítor Mota, president of the Board of Esqueiros, Nevogilde and Travassós, one of the suspects in this ‘plot’ that the PJ tries to unravel, establishes a company (João Moreira da Mota, Lda) in June 2017, to supply chemical products to the swimming pools of the municipality. .
The company has its own name, although it is better known as Vítor, which is why it was not included in the name of the firm to avoid arousing suspicion. Shortly afterwards, the firm was renamed after his sister, Paula Mota. However, the mayor had already signed a first contract with the municipality, amounting to 36 thousand euros, with his name. The second contract, worth 28 thousand euros, signed in 2018, already came with the name of the sister as manager of the company.
A source from the company that supplied the products to the Vítor Mota firm explained that the mayor did not have much work, since it was the initial firm that transported the products to the pools, with municipal employees who carried out the cleaning. In other words, the Vítor Mota firm served solely as an intermediary between the product marketing company, located in the Oleiros parish (Vila Verde) and the City Council. However, it was the signature of the Chairman of the Board who received the money.
António Vilela, mayor elected by the PSD, said he was unaware that the JMM firm was owned by Vítor Mota, despite having signed the contract with him.
“An internal analysis of the denounced events will be activated and the administrative procedures that are relevant will be developed,” said the mayor at that time, but nothing was made public.
There was another “problem”. Paula Mota, the new manager of the company, also worked in the public function, for which she depended on the Vila Verde Chamber. The Inspection General of the Treasury, attentive to what was happening, requested information from the Chamber to explain why an employee would be accumulating functions as a private manager without having been notified.
Contracts
The four remaining chairmen of the board who participate in the ‘web’ are contractors, some of them smaller and others larger, and they signed contracts with the municipality worth millions of euros between 2014 and 2020.
As far as we know, there are still no defendants in this process, only a license to ‘hunt’ the documents related to these contracts signed with the Vila Verde Chamber.
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