Africa-Press – Angola. The Supreme Court (TS) has decided to uphold the conviction handed down in the first instance trial of the “500 million US dollars case”involving the former head of the Sovereign Fund, José Filomeno dos Santos, and the governor of the National Bank of Angola (BNA), Valter Filipe, among other defendants.
The decision is part of the “conformation judgment” released Tuesday, about two months after the Constitutional Court ruled that the case was unconstitutional.
The appellants were sentenced in 2022 from five to eight years in prison for embezzlement, fraud and influence peddling, in a case that began in 2019.
Also tried with Valter Filipe and José Filomeno dos Santos were Jorge Gaudens Pontes Sebastião and António Samalia Bule Manuel, who were ordered to pay a fine and compensation to the state in the amount of five million kwanzas in moral damages and 8.5 million US dollars in lost profits and emergent damages.
The defendants have been charged in connection with the notorious case of the 500 million dollars illegally transferred abroad from the Central Bank of Angola in September 2017.
However, those involved had filed an appeal for unconstitutionality, which was upheld by the Constitutional Court on the grounds that it violated the principles of legality, adversarial proceedings and fair trial.
In practice, the Constitutional Court, in its decision of April 3 2024, concluded that the Supreme Court should issue a new decision taking into account the testimony of the former President of the Republic, which had not been considered in the re-examined decision.
The Supreme Court states that its conviction was based on a critical analysis of all the documentary evidence in the case file, namely various banking and contractual documents and the contracts signed between the companies and the central bank.
According to the TS, as for the additional questions arising from the hearing, the Court, in accordance with the decision of the Constitutional Court (which is the subject of this judgment), admitted the letter from the former President of the Republic, sent by the defense of the Defendant Valter Filipe, and, as a result, it deserved analysis of all the evidence in the case file.
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