Scandal || At least three young people facing charges of buying their 12th year (A level equivalent) exams have passed through medical school and are now practising as doctors in state hospitals.
This latest twist to a bizarre story going back years was made this week by national tabloid Correio da Manhã, reporting on the ongoing court case of 56-year-old teacher Dília Pinto and 35 former ‘retake’ pupils of Lisbon’s former Externato Alfa college.
The 36 defendants face various charges of fraud and falsification of documents.
According to CM, in some cases pupils did not attend classes or even sit their exams. They simply paid up front.
One ‘big name’ in the scandal is that of aristocrat Vasco Holstein de Melo, 35, a descendant of the Count of Murça, who only last week left Sintra jail where he had been serving a five-year sentence for drug smuggling.
De Melo is now back before beaks in a case that highlights just how slowly Portuguese ‘justice’ can take to unfold.
The dirty dealings at Externato Alfa brought the college to its knees in 2007, but it took another seven years before the case made it to court.
According to the public prosecutor, Dília Pinto forged teachers’ signatures, launched results and gave false “equivalências” – which means she used the fraud to help students get placements outside the country in universities that asked for grade-equivalents of their qualifications.
Currently facing 44 crimes of document falsification, Pinto is said to have made €380,000 through the scam – sometimes charging ‘repeat’ pupils as much as €2,500 to forge results.
“Payment was made almost always in cash,” wrote CM, “and then deposited in seven different bank accounts.”
The whistle was blown, the paper continues, in 2000 when an Economy teacher noticed her name had been attributed to results that she had never given.
Later, in 2013, DCIAP criminal investigators received another complaint – though by this time, Dília Pinto was ‘long gone’ from her position as coordinator for “repeat education”, in this case meaning education for students sitting exams for a second time at the college.
As the case is finally heard in Lisbon’s Varas Criminais, CM says that three of the students on trial have passed through medical college, finished their degrees and “at this moment” are doctors in public hospitals “from the north to the south of the country”.
CM writes that it “tried to contact” Vasco Holstein de Melo “without success”.
