Supreme Court increases prison sentence for former minister Armando Vara to five and a half years – Portugal

The Supreme Court of Justice (STJ) increased the prison sentence of former minister Armando Vara to five years and six months, in addition to the legal penalties imposed in the Face Oculta and Operação Marquês cases.

According to the STJ ruling, to which Lusa had access, the advisory judges gave reason to the appeal of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) which intended that the former ruler be sentenced to at least five and a half years in prison, above the decision of legal culmination of the court, in March 2023, which had imposed a sentence of five years and one month in prison.

“The appeal in this part is upheld and it is decided to set the single penalty for the crimes committed by the defendant at five years and six months in prison”, reads the ruling signed by the advisory judges António Latas, Agostinho Torres and Leonor Furtado.

The decision to aggravate the sentence applied was based on the category of crimes for which Armando Vara was convicted in both cases – influence peddling (Face Oculta) and money laundering (Operação Marquês) -, remembering that they fall under “highly organized crime” and which were committed in the normal course of the defendant’s activities.

“All of them were carried out within the same framework of life that the defendant assumed as part of the apparent normality of the social, professional and personal life he developed, despite the public positions held by the defendant, both in government and public administration as well as in banking. , which placed additional duties on them”, considered the judges.

The STJ also understood that the court of first instance “will have excessively valued” the time that had already passed between the commission of the crimes and the 2023 ruling, as well as the relevance given to the personal and family integration of Armando Vara, aged 70.

“The defendant framed his illicit activities within his life framework over a considerable number of years, without the factual evidence proving that he has been confronted over the years with dilemmas, inner conflicts or consequent reflection on the illegality of his acts, which indicates that his past choices were more rooted in personality traits”, the decision reads.

In addition to the aggravation of the sentence, the MP’s appeal also invoked the nullity of the sentence due to a lack of enumeration of facts proven in the reasoning and omission of pronouncement, either because it understood that last year’s ruling had not analyzed the discount for periods of deprivation of freedom fulfilled by Armando Vara in the single sentence, or by the applicability of the sentence pardon that the former minister received in the Face Oculta case.

According to the STJ’s decision, there was effectively an omission of pronouncement, which is why the case was ordered to be sent to the first instance to make up for the omissions, with the court having to indicate whether the pardon is maintained or not.

Armando Vara had been sentenced to a five-year prison sentence as part of the Face Oculta case, for three crimes of influence peddling, and was released from the Évora Prison Establishment in October 2021, after serving around three years, due to application of exceptional measures related to the covid-19 pandemic.

However, in July 2021, he saw the court impose a two-year prison sentence on him for money laundering in the Operation Marquês case.