The founder of the Portuguese former private bank was arrested in a five star hotel in Durban, South Africa. The South African justice must consider an extradition request for the one who has been sentenced to nineteen years in prison.
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It’s been almost three months he had fled to avoid incarceration. Saturday, December 11, the banker Portuguese Joao Rendeiro referred by an international arrest warrant was finally arrested in his hideout ostentatious: a five-star hotel in Durban, South Africa. On this 69 year old man, who thought untouchable, weigh three convictions for “fraud,” “breach of trust”, “forgery and money laundering,” for a total of nineteen years in prison.
While waiting to be heard by the South African justice which must rule on the request for extradition Portuguese, he was incarcerated in the jail deemed violent Westville, where, according to his lawyers, he received threats. For months, the Portuguese follow with a mixture of fascination and outrage his adventures worthy of a television series.
Founder of the Portuguese Private Bank (BPP), an investment bank established in 1996 and specializes in the management of the very wealthy, his brushes with the law began after the bankruptcy of the bank. In 2008, a hole of 700 million euros into the coffers requires the Portuguese Government to intervene to recapitalize the financial institution in economic crisis.
A succession of trial
In 2010, faced with the impossibility to deliver the bank afloat, it was finally liquidated, and several legal proceedings were launched against its leaders, including Mr. Rendeiro. The trial then followed, without it changes his lavish lifestyle, at his home in the residential area of Quinta Patiño, in Cascais, or limit his travels in Europe or America. Justice then let him complete freedom of movement, as long as no firm sentence is pronounced.
This is, finally, in September, when ultimately sentenced to five years and eight months in prison for computer and fake falsification and alteration accounts for GPP. A few days later, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for “qualified fraud” committed against customers. While he uses a third judgment, which sentenced in May to ten years in prison for having appropriate EUR 13.6 million from the bank between 2003 and 2008 for personal reasons he decided to take off.
A “scapegoat”
On September 28, while an order of imprisonment seems imminent, the banker, who is now in the trip to London, the unvarnished announcement on his blog, Arma / Critica. Defining itself as a “scapegoat”, he warns his readers that he will not return to Portugal. “My absence is an act of self-defense against an unjust justice,” he wrote.
While Portugal wonders where he hid the former banker, the press disclosing major transfers made to an account in Switzerland related to offshore companies, it is his wife, Maria de Jesus da Silva Matos , remained in Cascais, which is taken in the net of justice. While it is supposed to ensure that, since 2010, about 124 works from the contemporary art collection of her husband, so that they can be used to pay possible fines of her husband, it appears that a fortnight disappeared. Eight of them were sold at auction for 1.3 million euros, including three paintings by the famous American artist Frank Stella.
In November, M me da Silva Matos is under house arrest by the court and must wear an electronic bracelet to avoid the risk of leakage. It’s in his defense that Mr. Rendeiro broke his silence and gave two interviews to the press from his refuge in South Africa. Probably the main mistake of the most famous Portuguese fugitive …