The brothers Pedro and Manuel Bourbon, sentenced to 25 years in prison in the ‘Braga Mafia’ case for the murder of businessman João Paulo Fernandes, whose body was dissolved in sulfuric acid, were officially expelled from the Bar Association (OA).
According to Jornal de Notícias, the Porto Deontological Council (CDP) of the Bar Association (OA), confirmed the expulsion of the brothers Pedro and Manuel Bourbon, registered by the District of Braga, with the sentence beginning on February 29, 2024.
The decision is evident in a notice issued on April 12th and publicly posted in the courts’ atriums.
The document renders the 2021 CDP ruling final and subsequently ratified by the Superior Council on September 10, 2022, for violation of articles 88 to 91 of the AO Statute, with violations of the “integrity, independence, duties towards the community and the Bar Association”.
According to the same source, the start date for serving the sentence is determined after the deadline for the contentious challenge ends.
As O MINHO reported, on December 20, 2017, the Court of São João Novo, in Porto, sentenced the brothers Pedro, Adolfo and Manuel Bourbon, Rafael Silva, Hélder Moreira and Emanuel Paulino (known as the Witch of Areosa) to the penalty maximum, for kidnapping, murder and desecration of the corpse of João Paulo Fernandes, a businessman from Braga, whose body was dissolved in sulfuric acid.
After appeals, on June 19, 2019, the Supreme Court of Justice (STJ) maintained the 25-year prison sentence for five of the defendants and reduced the sentence for Hélder Moreira, a defendant who had already seen the sentence was reduced from 25 to 23 years by the Porto Court of Appeal.
“In relation to all the aforementioned six defendants, it is necessary to take into account the very high gravity of the facts as a whole, given the number of crimes committed (more than a dozen) and also revealed by the arithmetic sum of the sentences, the nature and the manner in which they were carried out, criminal association, qualified homicide, aggravated kidnapping, theft, forgery, fires. For this reason, and also given the variety and violence of the crimes committed, the needs for general prevention must be considered of great importance, and it is necessary to reinforce the community’s trust in the rules that prohibit such activities”, maintains the STJ.
At trial, it was proven that the six main defendants organized among themselves, creating a human and logistical structure with the purpose of kidnapping a businessman from Braga, killing him and making his corpse disappear.
With this, they intended to prevent the reversal of a stratagem through which the victim’s parents’ assets were transferred to a company controlled by two of the defendants.
In carrying out that purpose, and after monitoring the victim’s routines, four of the defendants went, on March 11, 2016, to Braga, in two cars stolen in Porto, from a car trading company.
“They approached the businessman at around 8:30 pm” that day, “put him inside one of the motor vehicles and took him to a warehouse in Valongo, where they killed him by strangulation, ending up dissolving the corpse in 500 liters of sulfuric acid, already in another warehouse, located in Baguim do Monte”, in the municipality of Gondomar, supports the accusation, considered proven.
