Five years ago, the mayor of Aljezur was sentenced to three and a half years in jail and the loss of his job.
This prison sentence was suspended if he paid €5,000 to a local environmental organisation but the loss of his job would stand, whether he paid the money or not.
Socialist mayor, José Amarelinho, appealed the sentence that has been handed out by the local court in Lagos and has carried on as mayor, battling relentlessly against the oil giants, Repsol and ENI, whose controversial drilling plan off the Aljezur coastline is due to be activated early in 2018.
Amarelinho has just heard from the court in Évora that his appeal against his sentence has failed.
The timing of this appeal result could not be worse for this popular mayor with municipal elections coming up on October 1st.
To thwart a legal system that decrees he must leave his job, the mayor is ready to send off another appeal, this time to the Supreme Court, against the Évora ruling. He also has appealed to the Constitutional Court.
This legal tactic means Amarelinho can fight in the October election which he has an excellent chance of winning, such is the popularity gained from defending his rural council area from the threat of oil and gas exploration on his doorstep.
If the ‘guilty’ decision is endorsed by the Supreme Court, Amarelinho must quit but at the speed this case in running, a ruling may well arrive near the end of his third, four-year term of office, assuming he is returned on October 1st.
"I have already turned to the Constitutional Court and the appeal is being finalised for the Supreme Court of Justice," said Amarelinho, keen to serve his final term.
Amarelinho is exasperated that four years ago, the Évora Court of Appeal considered the Lagos sentence null and void due to a lack of critical analysis of the evidence, and now it has concluded the sentence is OK. “A higher court must now decide this case,” says Amarelinho, adding that he "did not commit any crime when legalising construction in Vale da Telha.”
What’s it all about? The Vale de Telha development and the illegal licensing of building work between 1990 and 2008.
Amarelinho was accused of being part of a local cabal that “acted contrary to the law" over the licensing of works at the Vale de Telha development.
He and Manuel Marreiros, another socialist deeply embedded in the local council, ignored the local land planning regulations, (PDM) "acting with indifference before the law ... taking advantage of council powers in order to favour the conditions under which they held the position and support their friends or supporters."
At the time of these illegalities, José Amarelinho was a local councillor and Manuel Marreiros was mayor. In 2009, Amarelinho was elected as mayor and Manuel Marreiros was elected to the presidency of the Municipal Assembly.
Marreiros also was found guilty by teh lagos Court and was sentenced to four years and three months in prison for malfeasance, suspended if he paid €5,000 to environmental group Almargem: he too appealed this sentence.
Amarelinho denies everything and assures us of his complete innocence of all charges, as does Marreiros.
Perhaps more interesting is the timing of the result of the Évora appeal, coming just three months before the local election. Amarelinho is fiercely anti-oil and gas, the government is pro-oil and has on its hands a popular mayor whose common touch and eloquence have made him popular while creating a thorn in the side of António Costa’s administration.
Amarelinho does not fight alone, the Algarve mayors’ group AMAL also has taken an anti-oil position, but Aljezur’s location on the west coast, opposite the first planned test well, puts Aljezur very much on the geo-political map as far as Lisbon is concerned.
The Socialist Party machine would much prefer a pro-oil ‘yes man’ in Aljezur. A majority of the local population voted for Amarelinho, and are likely to again, as he has stuck up for their right to have a coastline unthreatened by the oil industry whose assurances of total safety and zero pollution have never rung true.
