A sad day for Silves ratepayers as reports are made public that their council has started to make payments in the Viga d’Ouro scandal.
The municipality transferred €480,000 to Banco Espirito Santo in late April, and in May a payment of €408,000 was made to Millennium BCP, the two banks unwittingly involved in the case.
The payments relate to a €6 million debt, including capital and interest, left for the current mayor Rosa Palma by the outgoing mayor Isabel Soares who now runs Águas do Algarve, hopefully with a higher degree of oversight into her financial dealings than was evident when she ran Silves council.
By the end of 2014 it is anticipated that payments from Silves ratepayers to the two banks will come to €1.7 million, with more due in 2015.
For Rosa Palma these debts "are a major constraint on the ability of the municipality to invest."
In fact the planned investment of the municipality was reduced by €2.3 million in this year's budget due to provisions that had to be made for these payments, on top of the €900,000 already paid in the Viga d'Ouro case.
Between 2004 and 2006 when Isabel Soares was mayor the municipality agreed illegal contracts with the Viga d’Ouro company without going through any sort of tendering process.
The debt was factored to three banks which later brought action in court for non-payment. These payments are the legacy of illegal practices that not one council employee has been fined or jailed for despite the clear intent to favour one builder, well-known to the mayor.
Soares and her two co-defendants, José Paulo de Sousa and Domingos Garcia, somehow managed to avoid prison or fines; Soares by blaming others, saying she ‘merely signed the documents’ that authorised payment, not thinking it suspicious that 1,220 payments were made to the same supplier, each for under €4,987.98 i.e. the limit where the tendering process would have kicked in.
"No mayor, not even in the smallest council in Portugal can be aware of everything. We must trust people in each department at the town hall to do their jobs correctly before documents come to us to be signed,” said Soares, shifting the blame onto her minions in the time-honoured manner.
See also: http://www.algarvedailynews.com/news/968-silves-budget-crippled-by-soares-legacy
http://www.algarvedailynews.com/news/508-silves-new-mayor-lifts-the-lid-on-the-council-s-finances
The second timebomb that Soares has left for Rosa Palma to sorting out is the illegal issuing of building licences by Silves council, leaving many with unsaleable properties that should never have been built, and would not have been built had the council not given the go-ahead.
See: http://algarvedailynews.com/property-news/2296-illegal-building-licenses-issued-by-silves-council
