Ports Case 5 - The Police investigation into the Temporary Workers' Denunciations

The Analytical Unit of the Public Prosecutor, resuming the Police investigation on Pedra's use of temporary workers paid for by the ETP at family homes, wrote:

According to the final Police report, all the debit notes say ‘payments of Mr. David Mendes Fernandes Pedra…”, from it can be deducted that these debit notes do not clearly and adequately discriminate what was being debited (identifying the workers used, the date and work hours, the place where the work occurred and the nature of the work), nor are they accompanied by supporting documentation justifying the amounts (showing the value incorportated the worker’s salary and social obligations supported by the ETP/RAM, namely, Social Security, insurance and the holiday and Christmas subsidies) going counter to bookkeeping rules, internal control procedures and accounting principles generally accepted and consigned both in fiscal law and in the Official Accounting Plan.

In our opinion, this evident debility in administrative procedures must have been intentional, since it appears inadmissible that the ETP/RAM does not prove the amounts attributed to that administrator, arising from the use of the labour of the temporary port workers for self-benefit or benefit of family.  Indeed, according to what was ascertained by the Police in its questioning, its seems one can conclude there was excessive concentration of functions both in respect to David Pedra, and to his daughter Cristina Pedra, who were after all the main beneficiaries of the labour used in their houses and apartments.

On the other hand, despite the searches made of the ETP installations, the Police refer that no temporary workers work contracts were found, relating their disappearance with the intentional acts denounced by some of these workers, according to whom many office papers were burned at the house of the administrator, David Pedra. The inexistence of these contracts, as well as other necessary information, namely the daily work control sheets, the itinerary sheets and the distribution of the workers per ship make it impossible to investigate the value of the amounts paid by the ETP to the temporary workers for tasks other than port work.

The report concludes:

Independently of it not being possible to confirm if that amount corresponded to the total disbursed by the ETP in wages and related costs for the diverted workers, and even if it had been, there is still at stake the abusive and illegitimate appropriation of the ETP’s monetary resources, and the financial costs of these ‘advances’ for a considerable period of time, and for which the ETP was only compensated on the 26^th of June, 2001;   

According to the telephone taps transcribed in the attatchments, it is proven that this administrator continued to use the temporary workers even after this investigation got under way, given that in the telefone conversations he gave instructions to the office staff (Paulo Matos and Ricardo Freitas) to swap personnel and to get temporary workers to work, both in his house and that of his daughter, and indicating that those people who had been working there, be placed in the ports in order to settle accounts.