Court orders payment of one million euros from those convicted of Social Security fraud in Porto
Former leader and staff members of the Diocesan Work of Porto must repay more than one million euros to avoid prison. They falsified records of service users over six years.
Court orders payment of one million euros from those convicted of Social Security fraud in Porto
Four people connected to the Diocesan Work of Porto, including a former president of the institution, must each pay between 100,000 and 500,000 euros to avoid being imprisoned. The ruling comes from the Porto Court of Appeal, which upheld the convictions for tax fraud but made freedom conditional on full reimbursement of more than one million euros to Social Security.
The Regional Public Prosecutor's Office in Porto announced on Friday that the judges' panel partially upheld the appeal by the Public Prosecution Service. The PPS wanted the defendants to pay what they had diverted, and the court ruled accordingly.
The total amount to be reimbursed to the public treasury is €1,022,258.81. The religious institution was also fined €40,000.
The custodial sentences were converted into suspended sentences, ranging between two and three years, with probation periods of three to five years. One of the defendants also obtained a reduction in his original sentence, which was reduced from two years and nine months to just two years.
The crimes date back to the period between 2009 and 2015. The accused manipulated the lists of beneficiaries of the social centres of the Catholic organisation to receive amounts exceeding what they were entitled to. Among the schemes used were the registration of deceased persons, the enrolment of individuals who never visited the centres, the double counting of service users who attended only one service, and the fictitious transfer of names between different social services.
The case first reached a decision in September of last year, in the São João Novo Court in Porto. At that time, the magistrates had already imposed suspended detention sentences on the four defendants, all of them individuals employed in the central structure of the IPSS.
Source: Correio da Manhã
Source: Correio da Manhã