During the final arguments of the trial in which former PAN deputy and current Chega deputy is accused of the crimes of damage and unlawful access, the Public Prosecutor considered that “it is not credible that someone severs their party affiliation at 10:00 in the morning and is making changes to a file at 16:00 the day before.”
“I don’t know if it would be more blameworthy from a legal-criminal or ethical standpoint,” stated the Public Prosecutor, without suggesting any penalty for the court to apply.
Regarding the alleged deletion of emails from the party led by Inês Sousa Real, the Public Prosecutor further concluded that it only took “some common sense” to “conclude, without great leaps of reasoning, that there was a massive change of directories followed by a delete operation.”
In the first session of this trial, Cristina Rodrigues denied the facts stated in the Public Prosecutor’s accusation. “For now, I only say that I reject the facts imputed to me,” she said.
In the indictment issued in 2022, the Public Prosecutor classified as “very high” the “illegality of Cristina Rodrigues’s conduct,” although it considered that a penalty exceeding five years should not be applied, as she has no criminal record.
In addition to Cristina Rodrigues, this trial involves another defendant, Sara Fernandes, a former PAN employee, who is accused by the Public Prosecutor of the crime of damage related to programs or other computer data, in collaboration with the current Chega deputy.
This case concerns a “computer blackout” of the emails of PAN leaders in 2020, when Cristina Rodrigues was still a deputy of the party.
Cristina Rodrigues then became an independent deputy when she left PAN and later ran on Chega’s lists, through which she was elected and is currently a deputy.
The Public Prosecutor considered that “the defendants acted deliberately, freely, and consciously, according to a premeditated plan, with the objective of blocking PAN and its members’ access to the content of the party’s email messages,” the indictment reads.
“The defendants removed thousands of emails from the mentioned inbox, which they knew they were not authorized to do. The defendants aimed to – and succeeded in – preventing the PAN party from continuing its political activity,” the indictment states.
