Former BES supremo Ricardo Salgado has revealed during questioning in the Monte Branco money laundering case that in July 2014 an under-the-counter €8 million payment was made to Zeinal Bava at Portugal Telecom.
The payment, Salgado explained, was for Bava personally as he had pushed for the purchase of the Brazilain telecoms operator Oi back in 2010.
The payment was made from ES Enterprises based in Panama, the company that has been used by Salgado to make secret payments totalling €300 million to a number of businessmen, government officials, journalists and civil servants over a period of 20 years.
Salgado said the payment to Bava was an ‘award for management’ despite Bava’s denial that he ever had received any sort bonus or award.
Bava's name cropped up on the Panama Papers list that the government now is wading through to see who has been paid by ES Enterprises and whether recipients have declared any such income on their tax returns, which is highly unikely.
The Oi purchase, under the Sócrates government, was part of a deal to not oppose the sale of Viva to the Spanish Telefonica company for €7.5 billion.
Bava’s insistence that he received nothing is at odds with the recently surfaced transfer record.
Bava stated to Correio da Manhã that he had received no “payment, payment in kind, bonus, or compensation from Group Espírito Santo or from any other associated company,” however Bava admitted that the money was lent to him under a signed contract with GES and was returned, with interest.
This is at odds with Salgados’s claim that the money was an award, not some sort of a loan, maybe the sort that never has to be repaid.
Portugal Telecom was the company whose board saw fit to lend Grupo Espírito Santo’s property subsidiary Rioforte €900 million of shareholders’ cash which was never repaid, the trigger to the collapse of Salgado's rotten empire.
Zeinal Abedin Mohamed Bava was PT's Chief Executive Officer and moved to the Brazilian company Oi until he resigned in October 2014.
He was on the PT board at the time of the disastrous loan which later he claimed that he knew nothing about.
Bava was moved sideways from PT to Oi in Brazil until rather generously paid off with €5.4 million of shareholders' money.
PT , now called Pharol, is suing Bava and other former PT directors, claiming in Bava case that he "never ensured that such internal control systems were in place that would prevent investments that violated the statutes, regulations and policies of the company."
The court submission adds that "it is well understood that he (Bava) did not, nor intended to reveal, financial reporting documents of such investments that he well knew were unlawful."
Bava's pay-off from Oi raised some eyebrows too as he is getting 36 monthly installments of €150,000. This is on top of the estimated €50 million he creamed in while overseeing the catastrophic collapse in PT shareholder value.
Post-Bava, Pharol managed to lose an additional 68% in value in 2015 as the repercussions of the Rioforte loan fiasco continue to affect the company.
Comments
I suspect Salgado wants to bring Bava down with him. The transfer was listed in the Panama Papers so it was up to Salgado to explain the reason for the payment. Bava said it was a loan so it will be interesting to find out if and when it was repaid, as he claims.
Clearly the first move for anyone in Bava´s situation is to lie. Which means of course that nothing that he ever says is credible, unless corroborated from another source. But we do know that he has (or has had) lots of money.
With him as with Salgado himself, we shall get anywhere near the truth and any sort of moral as well as legal resolution only when their own personal fortunes are at stake.