The court postponed this Tuesday until May 25 the decision on a network that would use false addresses in Penha de França, in Lisbon, to allow the legalization of immigrants, a judicial source told Lusa.
According to the same source, the reading of the ruling was rescheduled due to the need for the panel of judges at the Central Criminal Court of Lisbon to hand down decisions in other cases.
In the first session of the trial, on February 4, 2025, the alleged leader of the illegal immigration assistance network confessed to having provided his address to fellow Bangladeshis residing in hostels and pensions become legal in Portugal, but he stressed that he did not know that this constituted a crime, regretting what he did.
According to the Public Ministry’s indictment, Rippon Hossain, 51 years old and a Portuguese citizen since March 2022, was the leader of a network that included five intermediaries also from Bangladesh. and 23 other people, most of them Portuguese and residents of Penha de França, whose role would be to give their address or testify to the veracity of another address, in exchange for amounts between ten and 60 euros.
The scheme would involve the collaboration of an employee from the Penha de França Subprefecture, who would alert one of the intermediaries whenever one of the addresses became suspicious.
The employee, who is responsible for abuse of power, would have been the only one not to profit from the business, while the others would have obtained, between January 2020 and July 2023, from R$110 to R$14,850.
At issue are mainly crimes of association of aiding illegal immigration, aiding illegal immigration and document forgery.
The case was reported in 2022 by the municipality itself.
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