Former President of the Assembly of the Republic Augusto Santos Silva launched harsh criticism of the actions of the Attorney General's Office (PGR), which he considered to resemble “a house without a king or a rook”, taking into account the “dismantling of the web of evidence that the Public Ministry (MP) judged it saw in the so-called Operation Influencer” by the Court of Appeal.

“What I would like is for the Attorney General to fulfill the obligations of her position, which is to lead the MP, and, therefore, to answer for the things that the MP does, yes, but above all to avoid the MP seeming like a house without a king or a rook, which is what it seems to be today”, he said, in an interview with CNN Portugal, this Saturday.

Before, the socialist declined to comment on the statements of former Prime Minister José Sócrates, who considered, in an interview with the same channel, that the MP was the one who actually won the legislative elections of March 10. Santos Silva stressed, however, that “there are problems with the functioning of Justice, particularly the Public Ministry, which are evident to everyone”.

“This is already the second decision of a court, in this case the Court of Appeal, which dismantles the web of evidence that the MP judged it saw in the so-called Operation Influencer, and that is my concern. I want Justice to function with its competences, on its own ground. Politics is another order of things”, he said.

In his view, the MP's interventions “denote a pattern of prejudice, of believing that political activity, because it is political, is, by nature, almost criminal”, a pattern that “is not in line with a state of law”.

“There is a culture of laziness in judicial investigation in Portugal, which results in basic rights of people being put at risk”, he pointed out, saying that the body's investigations “live only on wiretapping and searches to see if they find something”.

“We know from news that has never been denied that a citizen, whoever he may be, in this case a member of the Government, was wiretapped for four years. The Court of Appeal now says that it was illegal. We know that there are citizens who spent almost a week in custody, who were allegedly detained in conditions of special humiliation and who, after a week, were released by the investigating judge, who did not see, in the evidence presented to him by the MP, any basis for any measure other than a term of identity and residence. There are allegations from the MP that show a great lack of knowledge of how political decisions are made, how investments are attracted and, apparently, the prosecutors have some ignorance and see evidence of crime in everything”, he detailed.

Santos Silva did not stop there, having recalled that the former Prime Minister, António Costa, has been “for five months” without being heard by the authorities, after the country learned “that an inquiry was underway, at the initiative of the MP, in the Supreme Court of Justice against him”

“We needed more for Justice to function according to constitutional and legal precepts, and with respect for people's basic rights. I do not agree with the fact that, in Portugal, there may be people who have their names smeared and who are not even heard during an inquiry”, he said.

And he stressed: “There is a procedure that is too common in Portugal, which is a procedure of people being condemned not in the proper places, which are only the courts, but in a ‘court of public opinion’, through initiatives that are very disrespectful, to say the least, of their fundamental rights.”

Questioned about a possible intervention by the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Santos Silva confessed that he had “no advice to give him”.

“It is up to the President of the Republic, under the terms of the Constitution, to ensure the regular functioning of the institutions and, therefore, it is up to the President of the Republic to judge whether or not we are in a situation of such gravity that it requires his intervention”, he said.

It should be recalled that Operation Influencer led to the arrest of Vítor Escária, António Costa's chief of staff, as well as the lawyer, consultant and friend of the former Prime Minister Diogo Lacerda Machado, the directors of the company Start Campus Afonso Salema and Rui Oliveira Neves, and also the Mayor of Sines, Nuno Mascarenhas, whom the judge released after judicial interrogation.

In addition to these, there are four other defendants in the case, including the former Minister of Infrastructure João Galamba, the president of the Portuguese Environment Agency, Nuno Lacasta, the lawyer, former Secretary of State for Justice and former spokesman for the Socialist Party (PS) João Tiago Silveira and the company Start Campus.

The case is related to the production of energy from hydrogen in Sines, Setúbal, and to the project to build a data center in the Sines industrial and logistics zone by Start Campus. António Costa was associated with this case and was the target of an inquiry opened by the Public Ministry at the STJ, a situation that led him to resign and call for early elections, on March 10.

Even so, in February, the judge of Operation Influencer considered contradictory and vague the Public Ministry's thesis that the defendants Diogo Lacerda Machado and Vitor Escária tried to pressure António Costa to approve a decree-law favorable to the company Start Campus, an argument included in the response of magistrate Nuno Dias Costa to the appeal of the Public Ministry contesting the coercive measures, none of which involved deprivation of liberty.

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