The Adventures of Ricardo Salgado of Arabia

Project Lawrence: the adventures of Ricardo Salgado of Arabia in the land of Colonel Gaddafi (Part 1): How Ricardo Salgado did business with ‘Gaddafi’s banker’, taking advantage of the close relations between Libya and Portugal under the José Sócrates government. The first in a three-part investigation carried out by Expresso, SIC and Setenta e Quatro.

Monday, November 24, 2008 was an unusual day for banker Ricardo Salgado. His diary indicated that his morning’s work wouldn’t start until 10:30 am, the time set for the signing of a deal between Banco Espírito Santo (the Espírito Santo Bank, or BES) and Libya Africa Investments Portfolio.

In his private reception room on the 15th floor of a building in downtown Lisbon, BES chairman Salgado and Bashir Saleh Bashir signed off on a joint venture and share crossing deal between the two firms. Hanging on one of the walls was Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Younger’s masterpiece, suggestively entitled ‘The Wedding Feast’.

The marriage between Salgado and the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had definitively been consummated. It was the culmination of a relationship that had begun three months earlier, on July 19, at the official inauguration of the Portuguese embassy in Tripoli.

There, José Sócrates, Luís Amado, and Manuel Pinho had formed part of a delegation responsible for introducing the first Portuguese ambassador to Libya, Rui Lopes Aleixo, to the local political, economic and financial elites. And it was Aleixo himself who told us that the creation of the diplomatic mission ‘was aimed precisely at supporting the entry of Portuguese companies into the Libyan market, in line with the openness Gaddafi had extolled to the Portuguese government’.

In a parallel meeting, BES chairman Salgado had signed a ‘memorandum of understanding’ and shook hands with Bashir Saleh Bashir, better known as ‘Gaddafi’s banker’.

The mood at the time was euphoric, in contrast to what global economic and financial indicators had predicted following the subprime mortgage crisis. With the world in a daze, Muammar Gaddafi took on the role of the brightest star in the international geopolitical constellation. He agreed to pay compensation to the families of the victims of the Lockerbie terrorist attack, renounced Libya’s weapons of mass destruction program and provided the US secret services with valuable information on his sworn enemy, Osama bin Laden.

At the same time, Libya was transformed from an incorrigible pariah nation into the new oil Eldorado for Western democracies, with Portugal a frontrunner in the race for the black gold.

Between October 2005 and September 2010, José Sócrates would visit Libya on four different occasions, even allowing Gaddafi to set up a campaign tent in the Fort of São Julião da Barra Fort near Lisbon, during the second European Union-African Union Summit, which took place in the city in December 2007.

But while the media and public opinion entertained themselves with the Libyan leader's extravagances, the Portuguese government was busy fishing for Libyan investment funds, gas and oil.

Salgado, meanwhile, was left with a single number ringing in his ears: 180 billion US dollars, the value of the sovereign wealth funds that Libya promised to invest between 2008 and 2010. And the chairman of the BES Executive Committee was well aware that successful investment in a country like Libya required a close relationship with the highest echelons of the country’s government.

Salgado's work diary reveals much about his connections and affinities within the world of Portuguese politics – including the dinners he had with José Sócrates just a few days before and after signing the deal memo with Bashir Saleh Bashir. Just two of the 32 diary references to the former Prime Minister between 2008 and 2011.

It was a period in which Luís Amado’s stock also rose significantly. The name of José Sócrates' Minister of Foreign Affairs would invariably be linked to Salgado, whenever BES’s Libyan operation celebrated a victory or suffered a setback. Amado was the government minister who created and encouraged a strategy of rapprochement with Libya, and was even invited to take part in the 40th anniversary celebrations of the coup that brought Gaddafi to power, on September 1, 2009.

‘I never had any personal meetings with Gaddafi. I met him several times in the six years I was minister, in institutional meetings, or as part of official visits,’ Amado told us. However, relations between the former minister and Gaddafi were well known in international political circles. In No Higher Honor, her memoir of her years in Washington, Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State between 2005 and 2009, during George W. Bush's second term in office, and the only US political leader to visit Libya in over 50 years, mentions the advice she received from the Portuguese minister prior to her trip.

Rice reveals that she visited Portugal on September 4 and 5, 2008 to meet with José Sócrates and to ‘benefit from Luís Amado's knowledge of Libya and Gaddafi’. She was received at the Palácio das Necessidades in a meeting that Amado described at the time as ‘routine’.

A year later, on September 21, 2009, the Gaddafi made an overnight stopover in Lisbon, on his way to the UN General Assembly in New York. He was received by Luís Amado on behalf of the government. ‘I don’t remember that day’, Amado, a former minister in Portugal’s Socialist Party government, told Expresso. Similarly, while Amado does not deny any of the 12 mentions of his name in Ricardo Salgado’s diary, he also claims not to remember much about them. His relationship with Salgado, he says, was one of ‘courtesy, as was the case with most of the people I had and still have relationships with’. However, he also considers it ‘natural’ to have ‘spoken a few times’ (‘I don’t know how many, frankly’) with Ricardo Salgado about the ‘international economic and financial situation and the expansion of the bank’. Specifically, into Libya, a country to which Amado claims to have ‘never’ accompanied BES chairman Salgado – despite later contradicting himself in an interview with us, in which he stated that Salgado ‘was’ present at an official Portuguese government visit to Libya and Gaddafi, between March 21 and 23, 2010. ‘The idea that I associated with Dr. Ricardo Salgado is a fabrication without consistency,’ he states.

Such Good Fellows

At the same time as he was making the most of Portugal’s foreign policy in Libya, Ricardo Salgado employed his trusted ‘advance scouts’ on the ground. At the end of 2008, after the agreement with Bashir Saleh Bashir was formalized, the BES chairman was still focused on his goal of attracting fresh capital for Espírito Santo Group (or GES)  companies through the Libyan treasury.

On December 11, 12 and 18, Salgado had a meeting in his offices with Alexandre Barreto, a GES employee referred to in the investigation into BES as acting as Salgado’s ‘minister for overseas business’.

On that occasion, the ‘informant’ brought news from North Africa, gathered through his ‘colleague and friend’ Fernando Costa Freire. A former diplomatic advisor to Durão Barroso, and a UN official during Portugal’s Cavaco Silva governments, Costa Freire confided to Alexandre Barreto that he had ‘a contact in the Libyan sovereign wealth fund who could be interested in being a potential investor in GES. ‘He wanted my opinion about suggesting the possibility [of a deal] to the group’s leader’, Barreto told us.

Since the first meeting between the two, on December 11. 2008, there are 68 references to Fernando Costa Freire in Ricardo Salgado’s diary, some referring to meetings at which Alexandre Barreto, who the BES chairman referred to as ‘Alex’, was also present.

In his account with Banque Privée Espírito Santo in Switzerland, Barreto used the nickname ‘Xana’. And it was through this channel that, between 2008 and 2011, the years when BES was establishing itself in Libya, he received three payments totaling around 735,000 euros, the largest of which, for 403,000 euros, was received through the offshore fund Balenbrook Investment, according to the indictment in the case that would be brought against the Espírito Santo Group.

Crossing the ‘timeline’ of Ricardo Salgado’s professional diary with the thousands of documents included in the investigation originates shows that the ‘mole’ Fernando Costa Freire wanted to introduce to Ricardo Salgado was Farhat Bengdara, governor of the Central Bank of Libya and until recently the president of the powerful Libyan National Oil Corporation. From the complex deck of cards that was the Libyan banking system, Salgado had been dealt the ace of spades. With Bashir Saleh Bashir embroiled in schemes that would put him on Interpol’s wanted list, the BES chairman forged closer ties with Farhat Bengdara. As governor of the Central Bank of Libya and, by extension, a member of the board of directors of the Libyan Investment Authority, the entity that oversees the entirety of the nation’s sovereign wealth funds, Bengdara encouraged Salgado to undertake the seemingly impossible mission of buying a bank, circumventing the strict protectionist rules of Libyan financial legislation, which he himself oversaw.

In Salgado’s sights was the Aman Bank For Commerce and Investment, a minor institution majority owned by Mokhtar Eshili and his family.

Within the Libyan administration, Farhat Bengdara would take the reins of the business and the dual role of ‘regulator’ and ‘paid’ advisor to BES, in a corruption scheme Expresso uncovered from a number of previously unpublished documents, including, for example, the minutes of BES Executive Committee meeting No. 1378, dated May 16, 2012.

At that meeting, the BES human resources department proposed the provision of consultancy services to Noor Consultancy JLT, ‘with the aim of developing the business, identifying partners, and providing advice to financial authorities and public institutions’.

JLT’s annual fee was set at 300,000 euros, plus ‘expenses and with the possibility of paying additional performance bonuses, to be validated on an ad hoc basis’. The proposal was approved on an ‘extra-budgetary basis’. The sole owner of Noor Consultancy, which has its registered office in Dubai, was Farhat Bengdara. Bengdara would continue to receive remuneration for a business deal involving Aman Bank, completed in April 2010, until at least 2013.

The minutes from another BES meeting, dated February 5, 2013, reveal that ‘[BES director] Dr. António Souto presented a proposal for expected expenditure in relation to amounts to be paid in 2013, under contracts established following the acquisition of the stake in Aman Bank, to Dr. Fernando Costa Freire, Dr. Adel Dajani and Dr. Farhat Bengdara. The executive committee approved the proposal, authorizing the payment of the respective invoices up to a total amount, for the year, of 875,000 euros’.

My heart is Arab

Farhat Bengdara, Adel Dajani and Fernando Costa Freire: the triumvirate assembled by Ricardo Salgado to spearhead the Libyan strategy.

While Bengdara tried to streamline processes from within the government of the Central Bank, Dajani and Freire were the ‘scouts’ on the front line. In the first half of 2009, with his men positioned on the ground, Ricardo Salgado tightened his siege on Aman Bank’s main shareholder, Mokhtar Eshili. At the same time, in Lisbon, the BES chairman received high-ranking figures from the worlds of Libyan politics and finance, including the country’s prime minister and Gaddafi’s finance minister, as his diary shows.

In his first conversation in Lisbon with Eshili on January 19, 2009, at a meeting arranged by Costa Freire to discuss BES’s purchasing of a share of Aman Bank, Ricardo Salgado mentioned only the purchase of 20% – though his plans involved effectively taking over the running of the bank.

In a summary of the results of a meeting with Mokhtar Eshili held in Tunis on  June 29, 2009, Costa Freire and Dajani told Ricardo Salgado that the Libyan banker ‘was visibly nervous’ due to ‘considerable pressure from us to cede control of the bank, including shareholder control’. Eshili was threatening to ‘interrupt negotiations’, since Aman Bank ‘was his personal project’ and he was not ‘willing to be forced out’. Costa Freire, however, emphatically denied such a report, telling Expresso, that ‘never pressured Mokhtar Eshili’.

At that time, Adel Dajani, a Libyan lawyer and financier, told us that, ‘there was an initiative by the Central Bank [of Libya], coordinated by McKinsey, to attract foreign banks to support the Libyan banking sector, and Aman Bank was part of this strategy’. While the state owned significant stakes in other Libyan financial institutions, Aman Bank was the only bank with exclusively private capital, which made it, according to the report sent to Salgado by Costa Freire and Dajani, a ‘virtually unique vehicle for achieving a dominant position in the Libyan market’ – precisely the BES chairman’s ambition.

After successive meetings in Tripoli, evidenced by the exchange of emails between the ‘advance scouts’ Costa Freire and Dajani and the BES headquarters in Lisbon, Costa Freire finally put forward, on June 10, 2009, a proposal for a memorandum of understanding between the parties.

The proposal was sent with the approval of the Edeluc consultancy firm, of which Costa Freire was the managing partner and sole owner. Today, Costa Freire told us he played no part in the drafting of that document and that ‘the entire legal process’ was guided by two foreign law firms. However, part of Costa Freire’s email accompanying the proposal for the acquisition of Aman Bank by BES states: ‘I am enclosing a draft of a document that we’ve discussed recently and which is intended as the framework on which an MOU [memorandum of understanding] can be signed’.

Edeluc Consultancy and Investment was dissolved at the end of 2021,after the failed attempt to bring the Chinese rating agency Dagong to Portugal, and was incorporated into Comportazul, an entity that today focuses on catering and the sale of clothing and household goods. However, the address of the company's offices – the suggestive No.13, Rua do Feitiço (Feitiço means ‘spell’ in Portuguese) – does not exist, as the local mayor explained to us. It is situated in Herdade da Comporta, just a few kilometers from Ricardo Salgado's controversial holiday chalet.

Between March and June 2010, Fernando Costa Freire received half a million euros, tax-free, through the BES slush fund, in the form of a success fee for the Aman Bank deal. 

Payments to Adel Dajani for the Aman Bank purchase, meanwhile, were received through a Tunisian offshore investment firm, Maghreb Venture Partners. Farhat Bengdara’s share was channeled to the United Arab Emirates, via another offshore vehicle, Noor Consultancy. 

On  July 14, 2009, a delegation from Aman Bank, led by Mokhtar Eshili, travelled to Lisbon to sign the memorandum of understanding that granted the transfer of 40% — no longer just 20% — of the shares and the future management of the bank to BES.

The legalities of the final purchase and sale agreement and shareholders' agreement were overseen by the Libyan law firm Zahaf & Partners Law Firm, which represented Mokhtar Eshili's interests, and by the British company Dawsons Solicitors, which represented the Portuguese side, and gave the deal its nickname: Project Lawrence.

Follow the Leader

Project Lawrence, however, once again made clear that under Libyan law, BES would be unable to control the management of the bank or possess the majority of its share capital. These concerns were raised internally at BES on several occasions, including in an email from one of the firm’s directors, Rui Silveira, dated November 5, 2009, in which he told the bank's director of legal affairs that, in view of the available evidence, he ‘would recommend that the project not be progressed’. Such warnings would have little or no effect on Ricardo Salgado's plans, which were inspired by that epic of all epics, the adventures of Lawrence of Arabia.

In February 2010, the Central Bank of Libya and the Bank of Portugal authorized the acquisition of a strategic stake in Aman Bank by BES. The deal was finalized and reported to the Securities Market Commission two months later, on April 15, when BES revealed it had invested 23.3 million euros in the acquisition of 40% of Aman Bank, ‘increasing the bank’s share capital by the same percentage, giving a total investment of around 39.8 million euros’. 

Despite the speed with which the entire process took place, Ricardo Salgado had, days before, missed a golden opportunity to present his new banking structure to the main political players in both countries. 

José Sócrates, Luís Amado and José Vieira da Silva had visited the Maghreb from March 21 to 23, 2010, stopping at Gaddafi’s tent. In a letter dated March 17, addressed to his hired hand and governor of the Central Bank of Libya, Farhat Bengdara, Salgado lamented that ‘it would be regrettable if Aman Bank and BES did not benefit from the Portuguese Prime Minister’s visit to the Leader [Gaddafi]’. 

Salgado had only one objective, revealed in an entry in his personal diary dated April 1, 2010: to obtain ‘information on access to sovereign wealth funds’.

Between May and August 2010, Ricardo Salgado mentioned José Sócrates’ name four times in his diary, met with Luís Amado twice and had lunch in Belém with Cavaco Silva. BES had to exert its influence to ‘benefit’ from Portugal’s aggressive foreign policy towards Libya, and the results were not long in coming. In May 2010, according to the Libyan Investment Authority’s half-yearly report, seen by us, Gaddafi invested 13.5 million dollars in BES bonds.

This was, however, a pittance compared to the 1.3 billion euros in deposits that Libya was making in tranches to Portugal’s state-owned bank, the Caixa Geral de Depósitos. The country’s wealth funds were never far from Salgado’s mind, as the following entry in his personal diary, dated July 9, reveals: ‘Amílcar – 2 BI Libyan – CGD’. The dates reveal Amílcar to be Amílcar Morais Pires, the individual responsible for Aman Bank's affairs in Lisbon, and who would have known of the almost two billion dollars that Gaddafi was moving from Geneva to other countries, particularly Portugal, in retaliation for the arrest of his son Annibal by the Swiss authorities for contempt of court.

But on September 1, Sócrates was back in Libya, for what would be his fifth meeting with Gaddafi. A visit that, in the shadows, Ricardo Salgado had prepared in detail.

According to his diary, between 23 and 31 August 2010, the BES chairman met with his frontline troops: Costa Freire, Adel Dajani, Mokhtar Eshili and Pedro Homem, the trusted BES executives that he appointed to manage Aman Bank. The sole objective was to influence and take advantage of (or ‘benefit from’) the Portuguese prime minister’s presence in Libya, as evidenced by a diary entry dated 26 August: ‘document for the Aman Bank 1st  Min. Sent to Professor Vítor Escária, advisor to the 1st Minister of the Economy’.

The actual Minister of the Economy of Portugal’s socialist government, however, was never part of the successive government visits to Gaddafi. With Portugal in the midst of a financial crisis and on the brink of bankruptcy, Teixeira dos Santos told us in an interview that it was ‘clear there was a strong, I would even say strategic, commitment to Libya’. As for the ‘dangerous relationships’ that linked Ricardo Salgado to members of the government, and these to Gaddafi’s inner circle, he simply said: ‘We’ve been around long enough to know there are no coincidences, right?’.

Meanwhile, Vítor Escária, José Sócrates’ advisor on economic affairs between 2005 and 2011 and a defendant in the notorious case of the trips illegally paid for by Portuguese energy corporation Galp, became António Costa’s chief of staff in 2020, a position he allegedly used to foster the ‘dangerous relationships’ that made him one of the central figures in Operation Influencer, the judicial investigation that led to the recent fall of Portugal’s Government.

Despite being twice mentioned in Ricardo Salgado's diary in heated discussions about Libya and Aman Bank (the first time on March 22, 2010), Escária told Expresso that he would not be agreeing to a request for interview. But the content of the ‘document’ he received from the chairman of BES would be revealed by the facts, in 2011, the year of Muammar Gaddafi's death.

Project Lawrence: Ricardo Salgado of Arabia’s adventures in the land of Colonel Gaddafi (part II): How Ricardo Salgado became interested in a worthless, poorly organized bank in order to hide the movement of large sums of money from Libya. The second in a three-part investigation carried out by Expresso, SIC and Setenta e Quatro.

Aman Bank was of little significance in both the Libyan financial context and especially in the global operation of the Espírito Santo Group, leading to criticism of the deal from several BES executives – apart from Ricardo Salgado.

In early 2011, after the outbreak of the first civil war in Libya, the Portuguese Securities Market Commission asked for ‘additional clarifications for the market on the potential impacts on the bank’s financial situation’.

In response, Elsa Ramalho, BES’s head of investor relations, clarified by email that, ‘at the end of 2010, Aman Bank had 478 million euros in net assets’. The equivalent of 0.6% of BES’s total consolidated assets, ‘an intangible value’ in the group’s accounts at that time.

In addition to its ‘lack of value’, the internal and operational disorganization of Aman Bank was ‘frightening’. Or, as Rui Silveira also warned by email, the functional and operational ‘deficiencies’ detected in the Libyan bank were ‘potentially likely to pose serious legal and reputational risks to the entire business’. The BES director was responding to the results of the first internal audit of Aman Bank, in August 2010, the final report of which concluded that the institution displayed a ‘general absence of a culture of control’.

Apparently, the situation neither worried nor displeased Ricardo Salgado. Quite the opposite. The banker also ignored the warnings issued by a ‘complete’ external audit of Aman Bank carried out by KPMG between January and February 2011, at a cost to BES of half a million euros, according to the meeting minutes dated October 26, 2012.

Instead of taking a step back, Ricardo Salgado followed his instincts, integrating one of the supposed ‘independent external auditors’ (Sérgio Alves Martinho, who had been KPMG Portugal’s manager for Libyan and Angolan affairs between 2004 and 2013) into the Aman Bank administration. Martinho would remain on the bank’s staff until 2014, when the Espírito Santo group was facing its own ‘Arab spring’. When contacted by email, Sérgio Martinho told us our questions were ‘very judgmental’, and that, essentially, they dealt with possible ‘moral and deontological’ incompatibilities in his transfer from KPMG — immediately after having ‘supported the acquisition’ and having participated in the ‘implementation’ of the ‘business’ — to Aman Bank, where he began to provide ‘support’ and ‘evaluate’ the internal control of the treasury and finance department. Positions revealed on his LinkedIn page, which has since been deleted.

Apparent amateurism and chaotic management were the hallmarks of Aman Bank from the beginning to the end of BES’s involvement. In a report dated July 30, 2014, KPMG, the official auditor of the Espírito Santo Financial Group (ESFG), stated it had been ‘limited’ in the scope of its ‘normal work on the financial reporting process of ESFG, due to the absolute impossibility of carrying out the same at Aman Bank’. 

For Ricardo Salgado, such a lack of scrutiny was the bank’s greatest asset, as will be seen later. The Libyan banking system was a well of obscurity, without restraints or controls, something the Portuguese banker knew perfectly well. ‘Most Libyan companies delay publication of their financial statements or, if they are published, they aren’t audited,’ wrote Libyan researcher Ali Elfadli, from the University of Reading in the UK, in a doctoral thesis on the functioning of commercial banking in the country – which included Aman Bank on a list of red-flagged banks. At the same time, the BES commercial machine was already describing its new ‘African jewel’ as a ‘modern commercial bank’ to the markets, as can be seen in the group’s marketing prospectuses in a number of countries, including Libya, Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique.

Sailing close to the wind from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, travelling the Atlantic coast, Ricardo Salgado had, in the meantime, drawn up, in his own image and likeness, a ‘rose-colored map’ of the African continent.

Yes, Mr. Ambassador

At the beginning of 2011 the outlook for Portuguese foreign policy’s was also rosy. On 5 January, the country took its seat as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for the 2011-2012 biennium, assuming the presidency of three of its subsidiary bodies, including the Libya Sanctions Committee.

Portugal's election to the position was unanimous and ‘acclaimed’ by the UN General Assembly, due to ‘the notion’ that the country ‘could guide the work impartially’ and ‘without hidden agendas in its actions’, according to a 2014 master's dissertation on the Portuguese presidency of the time, written by João Caleiras from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Ambassador Moraes Cabral, former chief of staff to Jorge Sampaio, was the diplomat chosen by José Sócrates and Luís Amado for the presidency of the Security Council in New York.

At almost the same time, Portugal’s socialist government sent its current ambassador in London, Nuno Brito, to Washington. He had been the ‘mastermind’ of the Azores Summit that preceded the invasion of Iraq, and was in line to replace Paulo Portas during Portugal’s ‘irrevocable resignation’ crisis of 2013.

Ricardo Salgado kept a close eye on the developments in Portuguese diplomacy, and on international geopolitics as a whole. The Arab Spring had not yet reached Libya (civil war broke out in Benghazi on 17 February), but it was predicted at any moment.

On January 21, 2011, as his first task of the day, the BES CEO met Fernando Costa Freire and ‘Ambassador Nuno Brito, soon to be of Washington’ (Brito would take office on 23 February). Gaddafi’s Libya, the American position when faced with an expected conflict and the future of Aman Bank were inevitably discussed over breakfast. By the end of February 2011, first the United States, unilaterally, then the European Union and finally the UN, imposed sanctions on Libya, blocking its banking system and freezing the assets of Gaddafi and his closest associates. 

Just as the rogue Libyan dictator’s world was on the brink of collapse, Project Lawrence, which Ricardo Salgado had carefully planned, also appeared to be on the verge of implosion. During the most violent days of the Libyan revolution, Fernando Costa Freire was Salgado’s closest confidant, as the BES chairman’s diary testifies. He was even there when Salgado described Brito as Portugal’s future ambassador to the US, in the middle of the afternoon of March 10, 2011, at a time when it was imperative to keep Aman Bank safe from international sanctions. Ambassador Nuno Brito, who declined to answer the questions we put to him, would be in the right place at the right time to intercede on behalf of Aman, safeguarding the bank. Just as Allan Katz found himself in a key position to protect the banker's interests when the West turned its back on Gaddafi. ‘New ambassador into (sic) Portugal, Alan Katz’ reads an entry in Salgado’s diary dated April 30, and there are at least 15 further references to the American diplomat between July 21, 2010 and January 15, 2014. Two, dated March 4 and 7, 2011, coincide with the period in which all Libyan banks were seized by international authorities – except Aman Bank. 

Ricardo Salgado knew how to maneuver his pieces around the various boards of the conflict. In a phone call intercepted by Portugal’s Criminal Investigation Police on  January 30, 2012, the transcript of which Expresso has seen, Salgado assured Aman Bank chairman Mokhtar Eshili, that ‘he’d be able to neutralize the United Nations sanctions through the Portuguese Government’, concluding that ‘the person heading’ the Libya Sanctions Committee ‘was Portuguese’. Despite several attempts to contact him, Ambassador Moraes Cabral, when confronted with the content of this wiretap, decided not to exercise his right to respond.

Almost dead in the desert

Allan Katz is yet to respond either. However, from the vast array of unpublished documents in our possession, and notes exchanged with journalists from The Wall Street Journal, it is reasonable to conclude that the American diplomat stationed in Lisbon contacted Ricardo Salgado at the request of the US State Department, asking him to process payments to employees of the US embassy in Tripoli through Aman Bank – the only banking institution that continued to operate in a Libya in turmoil and under close external scrutiny.

A communication from Pedro Homem, recorded in the BES Executive Committee minutes dated June 1, 2011, attests to the close relations between Ricardo Salgado and the US diplomatic corps. On that occasion, the vice-president of Aman Bank relates the gratitude expressed by ‘the Secretary of State [Hillary Clinton] and the US President himself [Barack Obama]’, which was ‘transmitted to him by Minister Counsellor Mrs. Lucy Tamlyn [at the time deputy head of the US diplomatic mission in Portugal], for the help provided by BES and Aman Bank’ in paying US employees expatriated in Libya.

The US administration extended a helping hand to Ricardo Salgado, saving a project that would otherwise have been doomed to fall at the last hurdle. And making Aman Bank the epicenter of all banking activity in a country whose finances and funds remained hidden under the cloak of Muammar Gaddafi, his family and his closest supporters.

It is in this context of instability that the Libyan leader, increasingly isolated both internally and externally, gave orders to move funds out of the country – more than 200 billion dollars, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, published in October 2011, or ‘around 30 thousand dollars for each Libyan citizen’.

Much of this money was to pass through the Aman Bank. According to what we were able to find out from a member of SIRP (the Portuguese intelligence agency), who was properly identified, the Libyan bank managed by the Espírito Santo Group was one of the main vehicles used by Gaddafi to illegitimately extract funds from the country, before Tripoli was taken by rebel forces. This information, obtained through a ‘Libyan spy’, was reported to the relevant hierarchies as of significant importance, but ‘no action was taken’. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, a US federal agency even ‘alerted the Portuguese authorities that it was investigating money transfers out of Libya through Aman Bank’. This agency, we were able to clarify, was the Florida department of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, an investigative division that reports to the US Congress, which informed the Bank of Portugal of an inquiry it was conducting into the illegal transfer of funds between Aman Bank and Espírito Santo Bank Miami. 

When the Espírito Santo empire collapsed, and Aman Bank was sold off as a toxic asset at a knockdown price, the Bank of Portugal – unlike in the sale of Banco Internacional de Cabo Verde – decided not to intervene. The reason, it told us, was that ‘it was not aware that any investigations were in process in relation to the sale or the parties involved’. The investigation was, however, shelved. And it is not difficult to understand why.

Aman Bank ‘served’ both parties in the Libyan conflict simultaneously, without restrictions or scrutiny – activity viewed as ‘natural’ by the Portuguese Government, ​​as could be noted at the hearing of Paulo Portas at the parliamentary inquiry committee into BES/GES – while at the same time establishing itself on the ground as the only banking vehicle through which international missions could operate in Libya. 

The minutes of the BES board meeting held on May 28, 2011 state that ‘strict compliance with international standards (...) led the group to request and obtain UN approval for the continuation of Aman Bank’s activities in Libya’.

And it was Pedro Homem – as ever – who at the same meeting informed BES directors that ‘contacts’ were ongoing with ‘the North American authorities’, with regard to the ‘provision of services’ by Aman Bank, namely the ‘processing of salaries and other transfers for employees of the US embassy in Tripoli’. BES was ‘expanding into Libya’ and was attracting ‘large volumes of local resources’, he said.

In the indictment of the criminal proceedings against BES/GES, apart from a brief biographical reference to Amílcar Morais Pires, identifying him as the individual in Lisbon responsible for monitoring Aman Bank, there is no reference to or investigation into the Libyan bank. And in the parliamentary inquiry committee into BES, only MP Miguel Tiago raised the issue of investments in Libya, taking Paulo Portas by surprise, as the Communist Party politician told Expresso.

The diplomatic web that Ricardo Salgado wove to defend his interests in Libya worked perfectly. Until, in mid-2011, a dizzying spiral of events shook the Aman Bank project once again, with the implosion of José Sócrates' government (it remained in power in caretaker mode until 21 June), leaving Portugal on the brink of bankruptcy, and seeking financial assistance.

The rebels of Libya’s self-proclaimed National Transitional Council, meanwhile, occupied Tripoli with the support of NATO forces, forcing Gaddafi to make a strategic retreat from the capital. He would be found and assassinated in his hometown, Sirte, on October 20. Farhat Bengdara, the skilled pawn that Ricardo Salgado had used to his benefit at the Central Bank of Libya, fell into disgrace. A cloud hung over the Libyan financial atmosphere, heavy with new sanctions on the banks, this time from within the country itself.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

Muammar Gaddafi was not in Tripoli when the rebels, who already controlled a significant part of the country, entered the capital on August 21, 2011. Yet even from an unknown location, the charismatic leader continued to maintain control over the Libyan treasury and finance. This perhaps explains the delay shown by some Western countries – among them Portugal – in recognizing the National Transitional Council’s authority. On June 21, 2011, Paulo Portas succeeded Luís Amado as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Just a week later, on June 29, the newly appointed minister formally recognized the new Libyan authorities: ‘Portugal was, as far as I can tell, the 14th country in the European Union to recognize the NTC’, Portas told Expresso in an interview. It was ‘an inevitable decision. If Portugal had not done so’, concluded the former leader of the country’s CDS-People’s Party, ‘it would have been left out of future stages in Libya’. The Portuguese government’s silence regarding the changes imposed by the Arab Spring in Libya in fact spoke loudly. On the very day that the US imposed the first sanctions on the Gaddafi regime, February 25, 2011, the Libyan ambassador in Lisbon, Ali Ibrahim Emdored, announced his resignation. ‘I don’t want to represent those who are killing my people’, he told the Associated Press. 

It was only on March 9, 2011, after a visit to Lisbon by the deputy secretary of the National Council for International Cooperation, that Luís Amado felt compelled to declare that ‘the Gaddafi regime is over’. However, on that same day, he had ‘an informal conversation in a hotel’ with an emissary of Gaddafi whom he had known for some years, as reported in various media outlets. It was important to weigh up ‘the consequences of the unchecked change of regime’, Luís Amado said in an interview with Expresso.

This was also Ricardo Salgado's biggest concern: to simultaneously maintain open cooperation with two conflicting factions.

The Aman Bank headquarters in Tripoli was closed for security reasons, according to a confidential communication from BES to the Portuguese Securities Market Commission, and the Banco Espírito Santo staff who ‘were expatriates in Libya returned to Portugal with their families yesterday [February 21]’.

The local employees of Aman Bank, led by Mokhtar Eshili, remained on the ground in Libya, and the banking operation continued to operate, with channels open to both sides in the war, as Paulo Portas told us.

Without the control of the Portuguese managers, Aman Bank was overrun by fraud and corruption.

At the BES executive committee meeting on May 18, 2011, Pedro Homem reported ‘suspicious movements of checks in the accounts of three clients’, totaling 2.5 million Libyan dinars (half a million US dollars). Although we have been unable to ascertain the amount involved, through an anonymous allegation reported in an email from Rui Silveira, a BES director, to Aman Bank vice-president Homem, we have identified that Mokhtar Eshili himself was involved in a fraud case of such magnitude that it led Silveira to consider whether or not BES ‘should remove itself from the share capital of Aman Bank’.

The 2011 financial statement reveals that at the end of the year Aman Bank had suffered an impairment of more than eight million euros, a trifling amount that did not worry Ricardo Salgado in the slightest. After having being informed of the aforementioned serious fraud case, the BES chairman reiterated his trust in his bank’s Libyan partner, as seen in a wiretapped conversation between the two bankers, intercepted by Portugal’s Criminal Investigation Police. It was he who was in charge of the group, Ricardo Salgado declared.

The protagonists in both Portugal and Libya had changed. Muammar Gaddafi was assassinated and his corpse put on public display on October 20, 2011. To keep Aman Bank fully operational, Ricardo Salgado hired a British law firm, Clyde & Co, to deal with ‘issues relating to Aman Bank’s activity in the context of the international embargo imposed on several Libyan entities’ and, above all, ‘matters related to trade finance activity’. In other words, to facilitate international transactions of financial products and services.

The proper functioning of the Libyan bank seemed of little or no interest to Ricardo Salgado. The important thing, as can be seen in the minutes of the BES Executive Committee dated July 20, 2021, was ‘to obtain specific licenses that would allow Aman Bank to carry out important trade finance operations’.

To this end, Pedro Homem proposed hiring true experts in ‘cases involving international sanctions’ – namely the London lawyers at DLA Piper, a firm that described itself as having ‘considerable experience’ in dealing with ‘confidential banking matters’, particularly with regard to international sanctions.

Ricardo Salgado had found the perfect partner to face the challenges expected in the post-Gaddafi era, even if the price of the advice was high: 550 pounds sterling [630 euros] per hour, according to the budget proposal we have seen.

This was apparently the last service Pedro Fernandes Homem would provide in the cause of the Libyan bank. On October 26, according to the respective BES minutes, he asked to retire, and for the ‘payment of the distribution of the Aman Bank’s 2010 results’.

Ricardo Salgado's diary entry for February 22, 2010 stated that Fernando Homem and Adel Dajani would receive four percent of the shares in Aman Bank and, naturally, would be entitled to their respective share of the profits distributed to shareholders – ‘[Adele + P.FH – 4% equity (50/50) – dividends x 4% - 4% result]’.

In his written responses to our questions, Fernando Homem claims to have ‘no knowledge of this note’ and states that it ‘doesn’t make sense’ to him. ‘I have never seen or heard it discussed, directly or indirectly,’ he said. In any case, he received at least 437,000 euros through the BES slush fund.

Meanwhile, in Lisbon, Ricardo Salgado was trying to realign his political agenda. In the four months following the inauguration of Pedro Passos Coelho's government, which took place on June 21, 2011, the chairman of BES summoned seven of the 12 ministers who made up the cabinet to his office. Battle was about to be rejoined.

Project Lawrence: the adventures of Ricardo Salgado of Arabia in the land of Colonel Gaddafi Part III – The routing of Aman Bank : How a change of government in Portugal made little difference to Ricardo Salgado's business in Libya, and how the banker reestablished himself in the post-Gaddafi regime. The last of a three-part investigation carried out by Expresso, SIC and Setenta e Quatro

If it is true that the government of José Sócrates and Luís Amado was a godsend for Ricardo Salgado's plans in Libya, that of Passos Coelho and Paulo Portas did not disappoint either. On September 7, 2011, Portas, the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, made a surprise visit to Libya. In Benghazi, he met with Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, obtaining a guarantee from the president of the National Transitional Council that all ‘contracts and agreements’ established with Gaddafi would remain ‘unchanged’, as described in an article by Raúl Braga Pires published on the Political Observatory platform.

A memorandum from BES/Aman Bank outlines Paulo Portas' visit to Libya and makes it clear how Ricardo Salgado immediately tried to woo the rebels, ‘putting an unsecured credit line of ten million dollars at the disposal of the new authorities (...) for the NTC to buy gasoline’. This document also reflects the relaxed relationship between Salgado and the government official: ‘To emphasize our strongest support for the NTC, an Aman Bank director appointed by BES was the only unofficial member of the delegation which accompanied the Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs on his first visit to Benghazi’.

Fernando Costa Freire told us he was the advisor Ricardo Salgado managed to include in the Portuguese diplomatic entourage. ‘Following the civil war and the extraordinarily complicated security situation, I accompanied the Minister of Foreign Affairs on a trip to Benghazi, I believe in September 2011, when a memorandum from BES was delivered to the chairman of the NTC regarding Aman Bank.’

Yet Costa Freire contradicted himself in the subsequent written interview he gave us, stating that he ‘did not remember having participated in that meeting that took place 12 years ago’. 

Barely had Paulo Portas returned to Portugal than Salgado asked him to attend a meeting at the BES headquarters on September 13, 2011, an invitation Portas did not refuse. ‘I felt it was natural that he would ask my opinion on the developments in Libya,’ he told Expresso. ‘BES had a significant asset there and the political and military situation was delicate.’

The situation in Libya was not only ‘delicate’, but extremely sensitive for BES’s operations in the country. So much so that, on September 19, Ricardo Salgado was granted a private audience with Portugal’s Prime Minister. ‘My diary’, Pedro Passos Coelho told Expresso, ‘confirms such a meeting. However in this case, as in several later meetings, I do not recall any specific subject that was discussed.’ Passos Coelho would speak about the Libyan situation at the UN a week after meeting Salgado.

On the very day he met with Passos Coelho, Ricardo Salgado sent a combat brigade made up of trusted lieutenants into the field. It was ‘essential that they go to Tripoli now’, Ricardo Salgado wrote in his diary.

The mission included, among others, Pedro Homem, Rui Guerra, Eduardo Pinto and Rui Cupertino, the latter one of the most enigmatic figures in BES’s Libyan campaign. He was part of the inaugural team at Aman Bank, in the role of chief risk officer, and was promoted to CEO when the Espírito Santo Group collapsed, a position he held until 2018, when he took over as vice-president of the bank. In April 2023 he returned to Portugal, leaving, overnight, his position as senior advisor to the presidency of Aman Bank.

Rui Cupertino did not agree to speak to us in person. But his name emerged during a recent conversation we had in Lisbon with a member of a Tripoli-based agency investigating the whereabouts of Libyan assets illegally diverted out of the country.

At the beginning of 2023, an inspection was carried out of Aman Bank, where Rui Cupertino was working. According to the inspector, who wished to remain anonymous, the former BES executive, when questioned, appeared ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘very nervous’. Shortly after the inspection, he returned to Portugal. Today, he works as an independent consultant for banking risk control and compliance.

The successive schisms, coups d'état and civil wars in Libya, encouraged by foreign governments and exacerbated by tribalization, have left little room for maneuver in pursuit of the more than 200 billion dollars that the elites close to Muammar Gaddafi are said to have moved out of the country – in particular, through the Aman Bank.

In 2013, the Libyan government led by Ali Zeidan hired a US asset recovery company, Command Global Services, but the investigation yielded no concrete results. Zeidan himself was later kidnapped, fired and forced into exile, and the information he gathered was also doomed to oblivion. Or maybe not. 

Haig Melkessetian was one of the Command Global Services operatives who, in 2013, tried to track down Gaddafi’s financial treasure - a fortune that, today, would surpass the wealth accumulated by the current richest man in the world, Elon Musk.

As deputy director of investigation for the recovery of Libyan assets, Melkessetian stated that he had been told by bank employees and other individuals in Libya that Aman Bank ‘had played this role [of illicit financial transactions and money laundering] for members of Gaddafi’s family, with the knowledge of Banco Espírito Santo executives in Portugal.’ 

This statement from the former CIA agent was taken by journalists from The Wall Street Journal, with whom we shared data and information. However, we were unable to establish fresh contact with Melkessetian, currently the CEO of a company specializing in financial fraud, Lazarus Brothers.

The Wall Street Journal also learned from a former BES employee that ‘executives at Espírito Santo Bank facilitated bank transfers to withdraw money from the country for Aman Bank clients and other creditors’. Some of this money was apparently sent to banks owned by the Espírito Santo family in Switzerland and Dubai, where the trail went cold.

The minimum amount to gain access to the Aman Bank laundering scheme is said to be around ten million euros, and the commissions received by BES ‘very high’, according to a source in the Portuguese intelligence services.

We contacted Ricardo Salgado’s lawyer, asking him to tell us about the events revealed by the former banker’s diary reveals, and the individuals involved in them. Francisco Proença de Carvalho, however, responded that he could not take part in an article ‘that appears to be based on investigation and speculation about the content of my client’s personal diaries’.

Turn the record over, play the same song

2012 was a year of reckoning and upheaval in Libya. The then governor of the country’s Central Bank, Farhat Bengdara, predicted well in advance that Gaddafi's regime would not hold off the rebels’ advances and that his closest associates, including Bengdara himself, would be targeted by the new authorities. 

Bengdara, Ricardo Salgado's main agent in Libya, employed by BES until at least 2013, traveled to Turkey four days after the start of the civil war, on February 21, 2011. He remained there long enough to convert to Islam, swearing his devotion to the militias that had risen up against his late friend Gaddafi.

According to the Reuters news agency, Farhat Bengdara ‘was formally in office until March 6, when the [Gaddafi] government realized he would not be returning.’

Less than five months after defecting, on July 3, 2011, the BES mole had been rehabilitated, and was already using his influence on behalf of the new regime, as can be deduced from a Post-It note that Ricardo Salgado's secretary, Teresa Amorim, stuck in her office diary: ‘Bengdara: Libyan National Transitional Council would like to meet with the Brazilian government’. 

Today, Farhat Bengdara is the president of the Libyan Nation Oil Corporation and runs Noor Consultancy, the offshore company through which he received payments from BES. We contacted both companies on several occasions, but to no avail. ‘It is all a cultural issue,’ Iman Bughaighis, the first spokeswoman for the National Transitional Council, said in an interview with Expresso. ‘Opportunists are everywhere now.’ According to Bughaighis, hope for a Libyan revolution died in its infancy, because ‘he [Gaddafi] destroyed everything, and always encouraged people to be corrupt’. Today, she continued, ‘the corruption is the same, but is more chaotic and opportunistic. We are either in a civil war or on the brink of a civil war.’

Bughaighis, a university professor, believes that Libya will only change through education. Until then, the regimes may change, but they will perpetuate the same families and protagonists in power.

On his second visit to Libya, on March 19, 2012, Paulo Portas met with Farhat Bengdara's successor at the Libyan Central Bank, the mysterious Siddiq Kabir. In a profile published by New Lines Magazine, it is said that Kabir ‘reflects many of the contradictions of post-Gaddafi Libya: state funding of warring factions, ever-shifting alliances, and collusion between political adversaries. ’It was this banker that the Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs asked to ‘provide security protection’ to Ricardo Salgado’s bank, and to the Portuguese citizens who worked there.

According to Paulo Portas, ‘doing so was not difficult, because Aman Bank was one of the few local financial institutions that processed salaries for employees on both sides of the civil war’.

Paulo Portas denies he went to Libya to perform any kind of favor for the chairman of BES, but Ricardo Salgado’s work diary tells a different story. On January 24 and February 14, 2012, before the ministerial visit, Salgado and the government official had dinner together. And, in a wiretapped telephone conversation intercepted by the Criminal Investigation Police, the chairman of BES informed his Libyan partner in Aman Bank, Mokhtar Eshili, that he had ‘an appointment with the Portuguese government’ and that the Minister of Foreign Affairs ‘had already been to Libya’ and ‘will go again this week’. 

‘The Portuguese government’, Ricardo Salgado concluded, was ‘committed to maintaining a good relationship with the Libyan government’.

In a Libya undergoing complete transformation, the chairman of BES also found himself forced to rearrange his pieces on the new and complex board of a game that was now beginning again.

Just as he had enjoyed the good graces of Portugal’s foreign policy towards Muammar Gaddafi, Salgado now needed to approach the new ruling elite in Tripoli – a topic that was not forgotten at a dinner he hosted for the Libyan ambassador in the Mediterranean Room of the Marriot Hotel in Lisbon, according to his diary, on February 27, 2012.

But the potential influence of Ali Ibrahim Emdored, who held out as head of the Libyan embassy in Lisbon for more than a decade of wars and successive governments in his country (2009-2013), seemed to be limited for Ricardo Salgado's ambitions. The banker wanted to reach the very top of power in Libya in order to deal with any potential constraints on the functioning of Aman Bank. This can be deduced from reading the extensive electronic correspondence between the BES leadership that we have been able to access. In an email sent to the management of Espírito Santo Bank on June 4, 2012, Aman Bank's Libyan lawyer called for the Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs to directly intervene with the Libyan authorities. Paulo Portas accepted the challenge. ‘In theory, it is natural that BES alerted the Minister of Foreign Affairs; and that the minister did what should be done, and what was his responsibility’, he told us.

Paulo Portas, however, ignored the issue of any commitment that Ricardo Salgado claimed to have made to the Portuguese administration in relation to Libya. ‘The Portuguese government, represented by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, has been interceding by telephone and formally with the NTC [National Transitional Council], the Libyan Government and the CBL [Central Bank of Libya], with the full knowledge of, and reporting to, the BES Executive Committee’. These words were taken from a statement made on June 11, 2012 by Rui Guerra, an Aman Bank board member between 2010 and 2012, to Rui Silveira, a BES director.

Paulo Portas assured us that he had maintained a ‘normal relationship’ with Ricardo Salgado.

Everything changes so that everything stays the same

With a temporary calm in the socio-political situation in Libya, and in the midst of the consolidation of the changes dictated by the new regime, Ricardo Salgado believed that Aman Bank was ‘in a good position to take advantage of the country’s growth opportunities’, according to the BES report and accounts for 2011.

Right at the beginning of the following year, on January 11, 2012, the banker requested another lunchtime meeting with Fernando Costa Freire.

The result of this conversation were revealed, just five days later, in the form of the minutes of the BES executive committee: ‘The human resources department requested authorization to proceed with the payment of invoices to be presented in 2012, in relation to contracts signed for the provision of services by Dr. Fernando Costa Freire and Dr. Adel Dajani, in relation to activity carried out in Libya, in the monthly amounts of 20,833 euros and 26,808 euros, respectively’. It was Ricardo Salgado’s first cardinal sin in the Aman Bank project.

While Farhat Bengdara was in charge of the Central Bank of Libya (and under Ricardo Salgado), Aman Bank could be structured in the image and likeness of its owner. But now, at the beginning of 2012, the new regulator was demanding the bare minimum from the country's financial institutions: compliance with the Governance Manual for the Banking Sector, a decree published in 2010, the same year in which BES consolidated its position in the Libyan banking sector. It was then that BES's operational leadership in Lisbon became aware of the serious omissions in governance and the general lack of control in its Maghreb subsidiary.

The conclusions of the ‘report on the analysis of gaps in governance of the Aman Bank’ that BES’s international division requested from Ernst & Young, and to which we have access, were devastating. Since BES took over the Libyan bank, Aman Bank’s board of directors had operated without filters of any kind, with no committees on governance, audit, risk management, nominations or bonuses.

At the regulatory level, more chaos: the board of directors’ own statute had never been implemented, there was no code of conduct nor guidelines to define conflicts of interest. Only Ricardo Salgado and his private troops of managers knew how the machine worked and what was really going on in Tripoli.

In Lisbon, various BES departments and directorates were shocked by this inventory of the Libyan bank's model of governance. In fact, even by February 17, 2012, the date of the ‘1st Steering [organizing committee] of the Libya Project – Aman Bank’, Portuguese participation in Libya was seen by BES staff as an ‘eccentricity’ on the part of Ricardo Salgado, which had little or no impact on the group's accounts.

In an exchange of emails between the two directors closest to the BES chairman, Rui Silveira revealed to Morais Pires that he was not even aware of ‘the composition of the management and supervisory bodies of Aman Bank’. Silveira knew, however, that it was crucial to ‘assess the independence of the current members of the board’ — Fernando Costa Freire and Adel Dajani. The two spearheads, who Ricardo Salgado had signed to successive contracts with BES since August 2010. And the BES executive committee had even set their monthly salaries for 2012.

At the Aman Bank general meeting, held in Tripoli on April 25, 2012, it was even decided that Freire and Dajani would participate in all four of the supervisory committees which were urgently required under the Central Bank of Libya’s rules: risk management, audit, governance and compensation. In the aforementioned organizational chart, both were appointed to the board of directors of Aman Bank as independent members.

We consulted Central Bank of Libya decree 20/2010, dated July 15, on the regulation of independent members. Fernando Costa Freire and Adel Dajani failed five of the seven limitations imposed by the BCL.

In an email sent to Paula Ferreira of the BES International Department, dated May 4, 2012, Rui Silveira ordered that ‘payments made to companies owned by Mr. Adel Dajani and Dr. Costa Freire be stopped, otherwise they will cease to be independent’, and that any provision of services contracts with them be revoked.

Rui Silveira had previously admitted that ‘all of them’ maintained ‘business relations with Aman Bank and/or BES’. However, in this new phase of the bank they should ‘sign whatever contracts they want with third-party companies’. When it came to assessing their independence, the BES director continued, ‘they should be required to declare that they do not receive any remuneration from BES’.

With yet another conjuring trick, the continued role of Ricardo Salgado's ‘advance scouts’ at the epicenter of Aman Bank business was guaranteed. But for the magic to have a concrete effect, Rui Silveira added, it was of the utmost importance that the process be ‘rigorous’ and ‘protected’ (his quotation marks) in the eyes of the supervisory bodies in Libya and Portugal.

Ricardo Salgado was, for now, left with only one loose end: Mokhtar Eshili, the old friend of Muammar Gaddafi and his brother-in-law, the ruthless head of the Libyan secret services, Abdullah Senussi.

On the very day (May 2, 2012) that the BES chairman sent a new risk and compliance coordinator, Luís Lourenço, to Libya, the National Transitional Council published Law No. 36: a list of 338 companies and people close to Gaddafi whose assets and properties were to be seized. Among them was Eshili.

‘There must be millions of people in Libya,’ said Rui Silveira in an email to Rui Guerra on May 12. ‘For what reason did the NTC include Mr. Mokhtar Eshili among the individuals and legal entities to be targeted by coercive measures and seizures?’

The answer was simple. Eshili had been one of Gaddafi’s most trusted bankers, and the new Libyan authorities were taking the first steps to recover the former leader’s fortune. The founder of Aman Bank, described as a ‘dangerous man’ by our source at Libya’s agency for the recovery of embezzled funds, was at the center of the storm.

On May 24, 2012, Aman Bank was added to the list of entities seized. Alarm bells rang at the BES headquarters in Lisbon. That same day, as recorded in the Banco Espírito Santo minutes, Ricardo Salgado made telephone contact with the Libyan regulator, and was ‘reaffirmed of his total trust’.

With Eshili temporarily removed, the doors of Aman Bank were opened to the new interests being established in Libya. Ricardo Salgado, who had been forced to include three individuals trusted by the Libyan governor on the bank’s board, rolled out the red carpet for Siddiq Kabir. On July 17, 2012, Aman Bank was removed from the ‘blacklist’ and returned to ‘normal’ operations. Mokhtar Eshili was also pardoned by the new regime, as was the case with the vast majority of Gaddafi’s followers. In early October 2012, according to Salgado’s diary, he, Eshili and Kabir, the latter at the invitation of Paulo Portas, were together in Portugal. The governor of Libya’s Central Bank came to Lisbon to deal with the funds that Gaddafi had invested in the Caixa Geral de Depósitos. Money that Salgado and his partner Eshili had never given up on getting their hands on.

‘After Gaddafi’s death’, our source in Libya says, ‘it was the new rulers who began using Aman Bank to launder money’.

When it dies, a leopard leaves its skin

At the end of 2012, for the first time in four decades, Libyans celebrated their country’s Independence Day in the streets. In 2013, after the Christmas festivities, Ricardo Salgado wrote in his diary that he would return to the Sala Mediterrâneo at the Marriot Hotel on January 24, to ‘celebrate independence’ with the Libyan ambassador in Lisbon, Ali Ibrahim Emdored.

But Salgado is unlikely to have had much reason to celebrate. In Portugal, he was testifying in the Monte Branco criminal investigation into tax fraud and money laundering, and irregularities in the management of BES/GES were soon making the headlines.

In Libya, political and tribal instability had made Aman Bank’s operations inviable. The dinner at the Marriott marked the apparent beginning of the end. Salgado dropped the Project Lawrence nickname and began calling the Libyan operation ‘Project Lockerbie’, alluding to the December 1988 bomb attack on Pan Am Flight 103, morally attributed to Gaddafi, which killed 270 people.

The BES/GES activity and results report for May, and for the first quarter of 2014, includes 77,000 euros in consultancy fees for the development of ‘Project Lockerbie’ and more than 430,000 euros for advice on the future of Aman Bank.

The same document once again lists Edeluc, to which 40,000 euros are attributed, in the category of ‘international projects’. Fernando Costa Freire, who was still a member of the Libyan bank's board of directors, once again struck a body blow to its ‘independence’.

In the written interview, Costa Freire assured us that he was never ‘an employee of BES or GES, but naturally the work I did was remunerated’. ‘I never had any involvement in the day-to-day activities of the bank,’ he said.

His name appears in Ricardo Salgado’s diary on 11 different occasions during the Aman Bank’s most turbulent period. On October 14, 2013, the chairman of BES wrote: ‘What about F. Costa Freire and Gaddafi’s cousin?’.

‘I do not know, nor have I ever known or had contact with any member of Gaddafi’s family’, Fernando Costa Freire said. An investigation published by the online newspaper Maghreb Confidential, now known as Africa Intelligence, confirmed that the cousin of Gaddafi in question was Ahmed Gaddafedam. BES denied this and asked the newspaper for a ‘retraction’. Adel Dajani also told Expresso that he had ‘no knowledge whatsoever’ about Salgado’s relations with Muammar Gaddafi’s former elites, nor about the use of Aman Bank as a vehicle to extract illicit money from Libya. The banker added that he was merely ‘part of the professional team of consultants, including lawyers and international managers who made up the due diligence group advising the head of BES’s International Division’. ‘Given the lack of banking competition in Libya’, he explained to us, the acquisition of Aman Bank was ‘strategic’.

Ana Gomes met Adel Dajani in Tripoli, at the home of Isabel Brilhante Pedroso, a diplomat who succeeded Lopes Aleixo and was Portugal’s second and last ambassador to Libya.

‘He seemed like a very urbane financier to me,’ Ana Gomes, then the European Parliament’s rapporteur for Libya, told Expresso. Dajani had ‘a very polite conversational style, and his position was that the Aman Bank did not present a problem’.

On one of the various missions that took her to Libya, Ana Gomes also ‘found out’ that Fernando Costa Freire was ‘responsible for the connection’ with Ricardo Salgado and that he ‘was constantly travelling between Lisbon and Tripoli by private jet.’

During her various inquiries, which she claims were always reported to the Portuguese government, Ana Gomes told us that she had understood that Aman Bank ‘was not significant in Libyan terms, but it was a very important bank for BES, possibly because it was [a vehicle] for the money laundering schemes that BES needed to maintain and which ensured links with other countries in the Arab world’.

A man leaves his reputation

From February 2014 onwards, Costa Freire and Adel Dajani were no longer mentioned in Ricardo Salgado's diary. And on June 25, 2014, following a proposal from BES's head of international management, Paula Ferreira Borges, Freire and Dajani were replaced on the board of directors of Aman Bank by Bruno Catarino and Hélder Carvalho.

The minutes of the BES executive committee state that the contracts previously signed with Freire and Dajani, ‘as specialists for consulting and prospecting business in Africa and the Middle East’, were terminated, and that ‘a compensation amount of up to 270,000 euros per person, excluding bonuses’ was negotiated.

Ricardo Salgado was on the ropes. The Espírito Santo empire was collapsing, stone by stone, in all its territories. And perhaps in Libya too. On the morning of January 17, 2014, the BES chairman summoned Mokhtar Eshili, Amílcar Morais Pires and Francisco Santos, advisor for international development, to his office to prepare the way forward for Aman Bank. The minutes of the BES executive committee of June 25, 2014 show that the January meeting resulted in a ‘proposal to hire Oliver Wyman to provide an assessment of opportunities to sell BES’s stake in Aman Bank’.

Mokhtar Eshili, supposed to be the interested party in the purchase, was also acting in the shadows as an advisor to the committee which proposed to sell BES's stake in the Libyan company.

The prospectus for the ‘roadshow’ for the public offering of Aman Bank, prepared by lawyer António Soares (accused of criminal association and corruption in the criminal proceedings involving BES/GES companies), publicly stated that the bank's management had ‘rules of confidentiality’ and that Libyan law imposed major ‘restrictions’ on the banking system. Not exactly an ideal calling card for any potential buyer.

According to BES's 2014 report and accounts, all attempts to sell the bank failed. In Lisbon, GES/BES's consolidated results in May 2014 showed that Aman Bank was among the group's ‘most significant debtors’, with debts of 31 million euros. In Tripoli, on the same date, cash thefts worth 3.5 million euros and a case of fraud costing Aman Bank more than 2.6 million euros were detected. The Libyan arm of BES was being looted, in both Lisbon and Tripoli.

On July 16, the last BES expatriates working at Aman Bank left Libya. Remaining in the country was unsustainable. Between May 2013 and May 2014 alone, the Espírito Santo Bank paid more than 675,000 euros for seven homes in the luxurious Palm City Complex in Tripoli to house its employees.

Considered ‘junk’, BES’s shares in Aman Bank were placed into a ‘bad bank’, following a decision by the board of directors of the Bank of Portugal on August 11, 2014. However, it was the ‘good bank’, Novo Banco, that appointed the directors for the interim management of the Libyan financial institution ten days after the announcement of the resolution: Francisco Santos, Paula Ferreira Borges, Guilherme Morais Sarmento, Bruno Catarino and Hélder Carvalho, all former senior and trusted executives at Ricardo Salgado's late BES. Francisco Santos even took part in the last meeting with Eshili. Bruno Catarino and Hélder Carvalho were chosen by the BES chairman to replace Fernando Costa Freire and Adel Dajani in the Aman Bank management, which already included a long-time colleague, Guilherme Morais Sarmento.

On March 2, 2015, Luís Máximo dos Santos, chairman of the ‘bad bank’, sold the 40% stake that BES held in Aman Bank for 3.9 million euros, one tenth of the amount that Ricardo Salgado had initially invested in Libya. The entity purchasing the shares was Freslake Limited, a company with no internet footprint that was created (and soon closed) in the British Virgin Islands, as we were able to confirm through documentation.

Represented by British lawyer Holly Hirst, who works for the multinational Hogan Lovells, Freslake Limited purchased Aman Bank without questioning the origin or reputation of the acquiring company. The Bank of Portugal told us that ‘it was not aware of any investigations being carried out in relation to the sale or the parties involved’, while the banking regulator ‘considered that the sale met the objective of maximizing the value that would form part of the insolvent estate of BES, and therefore did not oppose the completion’ of the deal. The name of the governor of the Bank of Portugal, Carlos Costa, appears 65 times in Ricardo Salgado’s business diary. ‘I have never had any personal relationship with Dr. Ricardo Salgado, neither before nor after assuming the responsibilities of governor’, ​​Costa told us.

Neither the Bank of Portugal, nor the Public Prosecutor's Office, nor even the Portuguese parliament were interested in a bank that Ricardo Salgado planned from the very beginning to be unverifiable, invisible and insignificant in appearance. Only Miguel Tiago, in a brief and inconclusive exchange with Paulo Portas during the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee into BES, raised the question of Aman Bank. ‘It’s beyond me why the other parties didn't raise the issue,’ the former Communist Party congressman confided to Expresso. ‘Billions of euros must have flowed through those channels (...) we can't even imagine how much money passed through there’, he added.

Paulo Portas, for his part, declared in the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee into BES that the Portuguese government had nothing to do with the case, since Aman Bank was supervised by the Central Bank of Libya. An entity whose former governor, Farhat Bengdara, was a BES employee and whose successor, Siddiq Kabir, was close to Mokhtar Eshili and his Portuguese partner, Ricardo Salgado.

We spoke to a former director of Aman Bank and also got in touch with Ricardo Salgado's former partner in Libya. The former assured us that Freslake Limited, the company that bought BES's stake at a bargain price, was created and owned by Mokhtar Eshili. Eshili, meanwhile, confirmed that ‘Aman Bank is now a 100% Libyan bank’, that ‘all shareholders are Libyan’, and that he is not ‘authorized’ to tell us ‘anything else’, although the Libyan banker is known to be currently ‘looking for a new international partner’. And that at least three former BES employees (António Cardoso, César Ferreira and Jorge Góis) continue to hold governance positions at Aman Bank. All that is missing for history to repeat itself, in fact, is the Pieter Bruegel painting hanging on a wall on the 15th floor of downtown Lisbon, from where Ricardo Salgado ran his operations. Like a ‘wedding feast’.