On 18 December 2014, at the committee hall in the Portuguese parliament, a muscular man in his early 50s, with rough features and grey wisps in his hair,was facing a grilling from lawmakers. They were trying to understand what was his role in the disappearance of cash from an Angolan subsidiary of a Portuguese bank he managed for over ten years. The man was Angolan banker Alvaro Sobrinho.

The cash amounts under discussion were not insignificant; there was an almost six billion USD black hole in the banking group's finances. Citing evidence from the internal records of the bank, congresswoman Cecília Meireles asked the former CEO if it was common for there to be “cash withdrawals of 525 million dollars?”

“No,” replied Sobrinho with astonishment. “Obviously, it's absurd.” The questioning was part of the deposition of Sobrinho, who from 2001 to 2012 ran Banco Espirito Santo Angola (BESA), the Angolan subsidiary of the Portuguese bank BES. The Government interest in the bank followed the crash of BES in Portugal, alongside the collapse of the entire network of the Espírito Santo Group (GES) of banks, companies and interests, which were active in more than 20 countries.

With losses of 5.7 billion USD in Angola alone, the group was saved after an intervention from the Central Bank of Portugal in August 2014. But this was a humiliating end to a financial empire with more than a century of history. The dodgy balance sheet of its Angolan subsidiary, run by Sobrinho from the capital, Luanda, played a vital role in the group's downfall.

Cecília Meireles's question about half-a-billion dollars in withdrawals was based on BESA's internal records, which suggested that many millions in cash had been walked out of the door.

The interrogation was unlikely to surprise Sobrinho. He was prepared. This was one of the hypothetical questions studied by his lawyers days before the hearing in parliament. In the emails, leaked to the EIC Network, it appears in a slightly different way: “Is it true that 500 million dollars have been withdrawn in cash at the counters?” the lawyers wrote.

Guided by his legal team, Sobrinho could avoid buckling under pressure by declaring that it never happened. He would be telling the truth. The money was never withdrawn at any counter at BESA. No one ever left the bank with bags containing over 500 million dollars.

His disbelief was phoney, however.

The massive cash deposits and withdrawals were fabricated by Sobrinho and his conspirators at BESA to cover their tracks and make it almost impossible to recreate the money trail that led back to Sobrinho.

Newly exposed documents explain in detail how the Sporting Lisbon owner managed to channel hundreds of millions from his employer to mysterious companies he secretly owned in Angola.

Three of these firms received a total of 433 million USD into their BESA accounts.

These payments are in addition to the 182 million USD transfers from BESA to accounts in Sobrinho's own name and two other offshore companies, Grunberg Investments Limited and Pineview Overseas, as revealed by Expresso newspaper in Portugal in June 2014, and now part of a criminal inquiry.

Adding these up means that Sobrinho appears to be the beneficiary of at least 615 million USD of fraudulent loans from BESA, a bank which he built up from the ground as its first CEO, before it collapsed, and needed to be bailed out by the Angolan Government.