Miguel Macedo, the Golden Visa minister who resigned last November as the net closed in on crooked civil servants, managed to distance himself from the recriminations, for a while.
Macedo claimed he was resigning for the noblest of reasons; that his ‘authority had been dimished’ but as this might have been a first in Portuguese politics, few believed that he was not somehow involved.
Macedo's happy state of grace has just been disrupted as pressure mounts for his parliamentary imnunity to be lifted so he can be made an official suspect, or ‘arguido,’ in the Golden Visa corruption operation that has seen eleven people arrested, notably the head of the Institute of Notaries António Figueiredo who is still being held in jail, and the businessman Jaime Couto Alves who is under house arrest.
The big problem that the prosecution has is that the former minister has parliamentary immunity from being dragged in front of a judge to answer the charge of ‘abuse of power,’ unless a request for a waiver successfully is submitted and approved but this could take some time.
Macedo is suspected of fast-tracking visas for Libyans coming to Portugal for ‘medical treatment’ and there are phone tapped recordings that may prove that his resignation simply was designed to throw the Judicial Police off his trail and that he was as involved as the others who saw fit to cream off commissions and 'thank you' payments in a scheme designed to attract foreigners to Portugal, not necessarily crooks offering bribes.
A company was involved in this Libyan visa business, Intelligent Life Solutions, also has been named in relation to inquiries into the life and financial times of former PM and Evora jailbird, José Sócrates.
Macedo has yet to comment on cries for him formally to be questioned as an arguido and soon may be regretting his suspiciously sudden resignation.
