The depth of business horrors surrounding kidnapped-without-trace businessman Paulo Fernandes of Braga has now emerged. The 42-year-old is reported to have owed “over €3.6 million to 104 creditors”.
“Just to the company of António Salvador, president of Sporting Braga (Football Club), Paulo Fernandes owed almost 620,000 euros”, writes Correio da Manhã this morning.
He also owed 686,000 to the “now extinct Banco Espírito Santo”, as well as lesser amounts to many other people – some of whom became bankrupt as a result.
The desire for revenge is thus the motive PJ investigators are investigating as they try to unravel the mystery surrounding Fernandes’ apparent vanishing without trace (click here).
Business deals and disasters “mark the man’s life”, says the paper, adding that his father’s own company, to which Fernandes’ was connected, also filed for bankruptcy, owing “more than €4 million to 37 creditors”.
There are also “more dangerous” connections, explains CM.
During one of his more difficult business moments, Fernandes put a total of 19 properties that he owned – valued at around €2 million – in the ‘safekeeping’ of a lawyer who is then believed to have started selling them “as if they were his own”.
Fernandes’ lodged a complaint against the lawyer, but the case was archived, says CM.
In other words there is the potential for a lot of history behind the violent assault that saw him grabbed off the street in front of his horrified eight-year-old daughter around 9pm last Friday evening.
Since that moment, however, police have remained ‘stumped’ – unable to make any kind of breakthrough that could reveal Fernandes’ whereabouts, or who kidnapped him.
