The Supreme Court of Angola has granted parole to former Minister of Transport Augusto Tomás, who is obliged to reside in Luanda and pay the total compensation to which he was sentenced. In one of the audiences, Augusto Tomás said: “Sometimes people confuse the essence with the appearance”…
Nthe decision of the Supreme Court, dated yesterday, grants “conditional freedom to the inmate Augusto da Silva Tomás, for the time remaining for the fulfillment of the sentence of five years, three months and 22 days in prison”.
The sentence of Augusto Tomás – sentenced by the Supreme Court in August 2019, to 14 years in prison, within the scope of the judgment of the well-known “Case of the National Council of Chargers” (CNC), a sentence that was reduced by the plenary of the Supreme Court to seven years and one month in prison – ends on January 10, 2024, reads in the judgment.
Until then, the former minister will have to “fulfill the following obligations: reside in this city of Luanda; full payment of the compensation to which he was sentenced, within the same period”.
The defense of Augusto Tomás requested parole, as the former minister had served half of the sentence imposed on him, with the Directorate-General for the Prison Service giving a favorable opinion.
The former Minister of Transport has been detained since September 21, 2018, so he reached the middle of his sentence on April 2 of this year.
Augusto Tomás was Angola’s Minister of Transport between 2008 and 2017, and responded in court for the crimes of embezzlement, violation of the rules for implementing the budget plan in a continuous form, abuse of power in a continuous form and economic participation.
The former Minister of Transport was acquitted of the crimes of money laundering, criminal association and the crime of participating in a business, due to lack of evidence.
It should be recalled that Judge Daniel Modesto Geraldes gave brilliant inquisitorial clues when he considered, on September 27, 2022, the citizen Augusto da Silva Tomás to be a criminal, in order to deny the granting of Parole, for serving half of the sentence, under the Proc.º 02/19 – Supreme Court, which sentenced him to 7 years and one month in prison.
Here is the learned “verdict” of Judge Daniel Modesto Geraldes:
“That said, the release of this type of criminal halfway through the sentence is not at all compatible with the social peace and public tranquility that is required for the granting of parole. Moreover, we would say that we consider the penalties to be too lenient and it will be time for the legislator to look at this criminality more consciously, either in terms of the penal frameworks that should be more severe, or in this type of benefits that should be verified that 5/6 of the pity, to avoid the feeling so heard by the people on behalf of whom we administer justice that “after all, crime pays.
Thus and under the terms set out above, I decide to deny parole to the applicant”.
It is important to remember, as Folha 8 did on the 12th of October last, that the “verdict” Daniel Modesto Geraldes contains an abject language, clumsy and sore, which should navigate, only in the sewers of mafia scum, for violating the rules of a right, against degrading treatment: “No one may be subjected to torture, forced labor, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, art. impartiality, freedoms, democracy.
Judge Daniel Modesto Geraldes denoted, in the open, that he had personal issues, against this prisoner (Augusto Tomás) in particular, taking an “adhesion sentence”, with the severity of the decisions applied, in clear violation of article 158.º CPC ( Code of Civil Procedure). First, with the defendant under house arrest, through a court order, with control and surveillance by the Prison Police, for having contracted COVID-19, unusually, in one day, the judge issues a search and arrest warrant, it in the media. public media outlets, when he was located and under police protection, who never reported the defendant’s escape, all to tarnish his honor.
A posture that not even the state of war, siege or emergency condones, the loss of rights, see, paragraphs d) and f) of n.º 5 of article 58.º CRA.
Second, it is legal bizarre to catalog a prisoner as a marginal object of resocialization, connoting him as a criminal, violating constitutional articles, umbrellas of fundamental rights, article 36.º CRA: “2. No one may be deprived of liberty, except in the cases provided for by the Constitution and the law. 3. a) The right not to be subjected to any form of violence by public or private entities; b) The right not to be tortured or treated or punished in a cruel, inhuman or degrading manner”.
Violation of fundamental rights is a crime and no one has the free will, even hiding behind a black toga, to classify someone else as a criminal, without substantiated evidence.
Moreover, in this specific case, not in other eventual illicit acts, but in that of the CNC (National Council of Shippers), the judgment, in addition to being tolerable, denotes a conceptual, incurable conflict.
On June 4, 2019, the former Minister of Transport said that his trial was involved in “other factors” linked to former functions he held, which resulted in the dismantling of mafia networks in ports and airports in the country.
Why is it that what was expected to be a tsunami was, until now, nothing more than a small calema, and Augusto Tomás did not put his mouth on the trombone, preferring to put the instrument in his suitcase?
Augusto Tomás denied most of the accusations made, emphasizing that everything he did, namely the acquisition of shares in private companies, the freight of planes, the payment of expenses with employees of the Ministry of Transport, such as food subsidies, medical assistance abroad of the country, and others outside the ministry, the payment of telecommunications bills, were all carried out with the knowledge and authorization of the authorities and to fill budget gaps that occurred mainly from 2014 onwards.
The former ruler admitted that the expenses were made for the Ministry of Transport and “not for the citizen Augusto Tomás and his family”, stressing that he has never used this type of practices in his entire life and has no need to do so.
For Augusto Tomás, his presence in court had to do with functions he held in the recent past, namely when he was appointed, in 2007, Secretary of State for Public Companies.
According to Augusto Tomás, he has always defended, since 1995, that it was necessary to restructure public companies, which he considered “one of the fundamental holes in the Angolan economy”, due to their irregular and deficient functioning.
Already as Secretary of State, he said that he started to work for the economic and financial diagnosis of the most important strategic public companies, namely Sonangol, state oil company, Endiama, state diamond company, public banks.
“This is how I leave this body. When we started to put our finger on the wound, antibodies against me appeared, that’s how this body is extinguished and I will end up at the Ministry of Transport, as Minister of Transport”, he explained.
The transport sector has the most public companies, at least 14 companies and seven institutes, advanced Augusto Tomás, underlining the magnitude of the sector that is transversal to the development of the country’s economy.
The former Minister of Transport said that he had restructured public companies, creating a two-layer governance model, with executive and non-executive managers, and creating a monitoring system for management indicators, human, economic and financial resources and operational technicians.
“As a result, we actually created serious problems, taking into account that, as it is in the public domain, there was a port congestion of about 90 ships stranded in the Port of Luanda, with daily expenses per ship of 25 thousand dollars, with annual expenses of more than 2.5 billion dollars, which reverted to the general population and it was necessary to dismantle this mafia network that was run by the international shipping mafia”, he said.
“And Mr. Augusto Tomás was chosen to lead this fight and we dismantled this network in less than three months. Because Angola had the most expensive freight in the world, just as Angola has the most expensive aviation fuel in the world”, added the defendant, highlighting the various international steps taken, with Angola ending up adhering to international Conventions in relation to civil aviation.
To prevent Luanda’s international airport from ending up on the blacklist and Angola seeing its civil aviation unfeasible, Augusto Tomás recalled that it was necessary to “take very tough measures”.
“It is logical that we had to put down, for example, 12 airlines of state ministers, generals and ministers, it was also necessary at that time to take measures to reverse the abnormal situation that existed at Luanda airport. Prevent the people who owned the airlines from going with their vehicles to the planes. We closed 17 entrances with concrete at Luanda airport and a fellow general threatened to blow up Luanda airport. President Jose Eduardo [dos Santos] said: they think they are in charge”, he said.
About these details that advanced in hearing, Augusto Tomás said that they were only “to make it clear who is the person who is currently being judged”.
“Because there are other contours around my prison. Therefore, it is not by chance that I stayed ten years in the Ministry of Transport, because it is a titanic struggle of some against giants, it is logical that it had to end like this ”, he said.
At the end, Augusto Tomás resorted to an adage from Cabinda, where he comes from, to say that “sometimes people confuse essence with appearance”.
“The parrot has a black beak, the sardão has a red beak, there is oil palm and the one who eats the palm oil is the parrot, but the one with the red beak is the sardão, which means that sometimes appearances are deceiving”, he said.
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