Is anti-corruption firebrand Ana Gomes set to be Portugal’s next president?

In early November, Portugal’s PS minority government agreed not to officially field a candidate to run against President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa in January’s elections, a controversial decision that could have a significant impact on Portuguese politics. In practice, the decision was sure to give a boost to former Socialist MEP Ana Gomes, who mounted her own independent candidacy in September—a leg up which was confirmed by a Eurosondagem poll released last week showing Gomes pulling into second place behind the current president. Indeed, in the wake of difficult regional elections in the Azores which saw the Socialist party lose the absolute majority it held for over two decades and netted the far-right Chega party its first seats in the region’s parliament, Socialist support has been coalescing behind Gomes’s bid for the presidency, writes Colin Stevens.

Following the PS’s decision not to run a candidate opposing Gomes, Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa stressed that Gomes now has a duty to “deliver a resounding defeat to the xenophobic candidate of the extreme right”, Chega MP André Ventura. Most recently, poet and longtime Socialist politician Manuel Alegre cheered Gomes’s “brilliant” diplomatic career—she played an important role in Timor-Leste’s independence process while the Portuguese ambassador to Indonesia—and highlighted her robust credentials fighting both graft and the far-right. Will voters in January give Gomes the chance to address Portugal’s own complacency towards corruption?

Anti-corruption tsar

Indeed, Gomes made her name in the European Parliament as a tireless campaigner against corruption, determined to root out illicit financial flows across the 27-state bloc. For of European politics buffs, her name is most usually associated with the Tax3 (the European Parliament’s special committee on financial crime) report which Gomes shepherded shed an uncomfortable light on the dodgy dealings which apparently went on right under the nose of former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in the sprawling Luxembourg freeport.

By the time Gomes and the rest of the Tax3 Committee determined that the style of freeport popularised by Swiss entrepreneur Yves Bouvier—himself under investigation by Swiss authorities for suspected tax evasion—in Luxembourg and Singapore carried an unacceptable risk of financial crime, red flags had already begun mounting over the facilities. In their simplest form, Bouvier’s freeports were just warehouses with special tax regimes to ensure that goods were not double-taxed in transit.

A Reuters exposé as early as 2016 questioned whether this new breed of freeport might provide a golden opportunity for dodging taxes, laundering money or financing extremists. The Tax3 investigation into the Luxembourg freeport which Ana Gomes helmed did nothing to alleviate these concerns. Gomes left a visit to Le Freeport Luxembourg alongside some of her fellow MEPs with “apprehension” and told the BBC that the facility’s “controls were extremely perfunctory and we did not see any real attempt to establish who were the real owners of the goods” stored inside.

After the Tax3 Committee’s yearlong investigation, the European Parliament overwhelmingly voted to adopt the Committee’s recommendations, including an exhortation to urgently phase out the facilities across the bloc. Even after the conclusion of the formal enquiry, Gomes has continued fighting against the facilities - in response to Boris Johnson’s plan to establish a network of 10 freeports across the UK, Gomes warned the British parliament about the potential risks from the facilities and urged them to implement a “Bouvier rule” forbidding the storage of high-value art and mandating additional scrutiny of freeports’ major shareholders.

If Gomes cemented her international reputation as an anti-corruption crusader through the freeports investigation she shepherded as an MEP, she’s also gone after graft closer to home, taking particular aim at Angolan billionaire Isabel dos Santos. Dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman, apparently exploited Portuguese financial institutions to loot Angola, including by receiving more than €500 million in credit from 13 Portuguese banks despite serious money laundering concerns.

As this January’s Luanda Leaks outlined, dos Santos apparently parlayed her father’s longtime rule of Angola into lucrative grift, legitimizing the millions she siphoned from Angolan state companies by investing them in a number of strategically important businesses in Portugal.  After Western banks ramped up their scrutiny of dubious financial transactions, dos Santos started investing in the banks themselves, buying partial stakes in two Portuguese lenders which then extended her substantial loans and opened bank accounts for her various shell companies so that she could buy European real estate.

Gomes has been one of the strongest voices advocating for Portuguese authorities and institutions to take a harsher line on dos Santos, rather than wilfully turning a blind eye to her apparent pillaging of the Angolan treasury. She brought a complaint before the Portuguese public prosecutor in January, accusing dos Santos of money laundering and casting doubt on the origin of the funds she had invested in Portugal, and successfully fended off a libel suit from the Angolan billionaire.

“The level of complicity here was […] very much political”, Gomes explained, acknowledging that ferreting out all the ways in which Lisbon helped Luanda’s “princess” stash away stolen cash would be difficult given that it would implicate senior-level Portuguese politicians from across the political spectrum.

If Ana Gomes wins the presidential elections in January, however, she will no doubt try and get to the bottom of the scandal which, according to her, has turned Portugal into a laundry room for international financial criminals. Though Socialist party cadres are wary of Gomes’s dogmatism, someone with her anti-corruption chops might be just what Portugal needs. Between the country’s role in the Luanda Leaks and a study by Transparency International ranking Lisbon one rung above Botswana, Portugal could undoubtedly provide Gomes with plenty of fodder for her anti-corruption crusade.

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