“The court did not find the facts proven. This case is nothing but a fallacy. They did not understand that they are dragging fans into this. What did my client do to be sitting here? He wasn’t even stopped from exercising his role at FC Porto,” stated lawyer Cristiana Carvalho during the final arguments at the Porto District Court.
Carvalho argued that “asking for prison sentences for all, including six actual ones, is shocking,” in a case where 12 defendants are accused of over 30 co-authored crimes, demanding “the acquittal, without a shadow of a doubt,” of her client.
Francisco Duarte, the lawyer representing Hugo Loureiro, known as ‘Fanfas’, criticized the proceedings as disorganized, describing the case as “a patchwork quilt that the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) assembled for an indictment fable.”
He recalled that during the first interrogation, there was a witness from FC Porto’s social bodies who set everything up, but no evidence of this is in the case file, and afterward, “nothing was done.”
“Hugo Loureiro knows he will be convicted ever since his gun was seized. A detrimental issue for my client is the CCTV footage; the camera was moved, yet the MP did not make the camera operator a defendant,” stated Duarte.
The lawyer for Fábio Sousa, António Caetano, asked the panel of judges to remove all presumptions and generic acts from the accusation and requested acquittal of all alleged crimes.
António Caetano acknowledged that two relevant spontaneous episodes of violence occurred during the assembly but believed these could not justify a case involving 12 people.
“Being present at the location [assembly] is not enough for a conviction. In Carlos Nes’s case [known as ‘Jamaica’], this evidence does not exist. Therefore, I ask the court for his acquittal,” requested his representative, Mariana Espírito Santo.
The lawyer argued that “the case is a fictional construction of events at the AG,” which was important for FC Porto, but were not premeditated or planned, and the defendants took responsibility for them.
“Carlos Nunes attended as an FC Porto member, not as a Super Dragões member. No witness identified Carlos Nunes as the perpetrator of any criminal act, quite the opposite,” added Espírito Santo.
José Pedro’s lawyer, Adélia Moreira, described the “process as a complete disappointment,” arguing there was no co-authorship or planning of events, and that the MP’s allegations were a desperate measure to find evidence.
She asserted that none of the defendants had responsibility for organizing the AG, nor the power to interrupt it, and that the statutes would never have been voted on there.
“The evidence for all the alleged crimes was not presented, therefore the court cannot convict. Indeterminate injuries, clinically not determined, reflect the MP’s lack of substantiation, which violated the defendants’ rights,” she said.
She admitted that “there was a kick, but no injury, and the plaintiff Henrique Ramos expressed his wish to withdraw the complaint in the courtroom and that all conditions were met for this to happen.
“The defendant José Pedro has already suffered irreversible damage for the kick he gave. He even had to change jobs. It’s ridiculous for the MP to ask for José Pedro’s conviction for co-authorship, just as it was to ask for the conviction of all other defendants for an act he alone committed, so I ask for José Pedro’s acquittal,” she said.
Lawyer Marisa Oliveira, representing José Dias, known as Zé da Senhora da Hora, believed that he was implicated in a series of facts that were attributed to him not through specific actions but generically.
“The evidence is weak, manifestly poor for attributing multiple crimes in co-authorship with all other defendants,” Oliveira stated, requesting José Dias’s acquittal.
The defendants include Fernando Madureira, former leader of the Super Dragões, his wife Sandra Madureira, Vítor Catão, and nine others, accused of crimes allegedly committed during an FC Porto general assembly in November 2023.
The issue involves an alleged attempt by the Super Dragões fan group to “create a climate of intimidation and fear” at the FC Porto AG, where several incidents and assaults occurred to approve the statutory revision “of interest to the ‘blue and white’ board,” then led by former club president Pinto da Costa, according to the MP’s accusation.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) requested on Monday prison sentences of more than five years for defendants Fernando and Sandra Madureira, Vítor Catão, Hugo ‘Polaco’, and Vítor ‘Aleixo’, and his namesake son, as part of Operation Pretoriano.
Prosecutor Susana Catarino also advocated suspended sentences for the other six defendants and harsher penalties for Fernando and Sandra Madureira for leading the alleged planning of disturbances at the FC Porto general assembly (AG) in November 2023.
The 12 defendants in Operation Pretoriano, including former Super Dragões leader Fernando Madureira, the only one in preventive detention, began answering for 31 crimes on March 17 at the Tribunal de São João Novo in Porto.
The 22nd session was concluded by Judge Ana Dias, responsible for the Operation Pretoriano trial, after the rights of reply had been exercised, and she announced that the verdict would be delivered on July 31 at 14:00.
