The Constitutional Court rejected Armando Vara’s challenge to the decision to reverse the sentence pardon that had been granted to him during the pandemic, which should lead the former ruler to return to prison to serve the remaining time.
The decision of the Constitutional Court (TC) is dated September 16 and rejects the appeal of the defense of the former ruler of the Government of José Sócrates and former administrator of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, a defendant already convicted in the Face Oculta and Operação Marquês cases.
The sentence of five and a half years in prison, a legal maximum, and without the right to apply the two-year pardon granted during the pandemic, was confirmed in May by the Supreme Court of Justice (STJ).
According to the February ruling that Lusa had access to at the time, Armando Vara was wrong in claiming that the partial pardon within the scope of the emergency measures to combat Covid-19 that removed two years from his five-year prison sentence should be maintained in the legal framework that had been decided in the meantime, which established a single sentence of five years and six months in prison.
Armando Vara’s defense claimed that with the application of partial pardon of sentence there were only six months of prison sentence left to serve as Armando Vara, asking that this could happen under house arrest, but by rejecting the right to benefit from this pardon, the STJ obliges the former minister of José Sócrates’ socialist government to still have to serve two years, five months and 27 days in prison.
The legal height includes a conviction for the crime of money laundering, which, according to the assumptions of the law on partial pardon of sentences during the pandemic, excludes Armando Vara from the possibility of benefiting from this pardon.
The law determined that partial pardon is not applicable to convictions for money laundering crimes.
Fulfillment of the remaining prison time is now dependent on the TC’s decision becoming final and the case being referred to the court of origin.
Only after re-entering the prison system will there be a decision from the Sentence Execution Court to either grant parole or change the conditions of prison, allowing, for example, house arrest or other models of serving a sentence.
The TC’s decision also obliges Armando Vara to pay legal costs in the amount of 1,530 euros.
In May 2024, 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.
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 in October 2021, after serving around three years, due to the 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.
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