Three ex-bosses of the Association PME-Portugal have been accused of a €7 million fraud following an investigation by the Judicial Police and the General Inspection of Finance, which has been going on for five years.
Missing funds at the community support scheme for vocational training were highlighted by three former employees who went to the authorities.
The investigation by the Judicial Police and the General Inspection of Finance has so far created 165 files of more than 80,000 pages which now have been sent to the prosecutor.
From the €11 million granted by the European Social Fund to the Association PME- Portugal, based in Braga and Lisbon, €7 million is alleged to have been misused or misappropriated.
The former president of the association, Joaquim Rocha Cunha, his wife Lourdes Mota Campos, and Paulo Lima Peixoto have been charged with various types of fraudulent activity, crimes carrying a maximum penalty of five to six years in prison.
The investigation into the accounts of several companies linked to the Association, some of them based in tax havens, was started in 2008 and included 50 searches carried out by the Judicial Police.
The large sum that was sent by the European Social Fund to the Association PME- Portugal provoked the Anti-fraud Committee of the European Union to send a team of investigators to Braga to be briefed about the case by the court and the Judicial Police.
The scheme channelled the EU funds to organisations linked to PME-Portugal. Various associated training services companies received the funds which then disappeared and certainly were not used for their intended purposes.
Joaquim Rocha Cunha, who denied any wrongdoing in 2008, currently lives in Rio de Janeiro and is connected to Ideia Atlântico, which provided consultancy in the field of internationalisation for Brazil, Angola and China.
