To shed some light on the arrest of Portugal’s former prime minister Jose Socrates, euronews spoke to João Batalha from Transparency International in Lisbon.
“The news doesn’t surprise me knowing that there were suspicions for some time now and the investigation was well known. There a lot of doubts about the style of life that José Socrates adopted after leaving the government,” noted Batalha. After stepping down from power in 2011 Socrates attended university in Paris to study political science as well as becoming a regular commentator on Portuguese TV RTP.
“The justice sytem in Portugal is bottlenecked,” explained Batalha.
“The inquiries related to the economy, finance and corruption that are opened have resulted very few indictments, and those indictments give rise to just a few condemnations and those condemnations result in not to many prison sentences. So there is a big problem of lack of efficiency of justice.”