Edmundo Martinho says that the company where his son worked was “the only one” in Portugal authorized to carry out cryptocurrency transactions. And truth?

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The former provider of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa (SCML), Edmundo Martinho, was at Parliament this morning (May 8) to provide clarifications on the financial situation of the institution and, more specifically, the business of internationalization of social games that resulted on one loss of more than 50 million euros between 2020 and 2023.

During the hearing, asked about the fact that your son works at Utrusthired by SCML to provide the service of exchanging cryptocurrencies for legal tender, as part of an investment of 500 thousand euros in a project linked to the NFT virtual art market (English acronym for Non-Fungible Tokena unique virtual asset that cannot be replaced or exchanged), Martinho devalued the case and said it was nothing more than a mere “coincidence“.

“Santa Casa has an artistic and religious heritage that is extremely valuable and unique on a global scale and even more so on a European scale. The question that arose was that at the time there was cryptocurrency fever on the one hand and the NFT on the other, with absolutely incredible transactions from a financial point of view”, he began by explaining to the deputies of the Labor, Social Security and Inclusion Committee.

And where does your son fit into this story? Martinho justified that his son worked on “these subjects” and “had particular aptitude for technological issues“. For this reason, he asked him to, “merely free of charge, make a presentation on the issue of blockchaincryptocurrencies and NFTs”, so that it was clear “to the table and a group of people” what exactly this was.

“Coincidence of coincidences, there is a company that we were hiring called Utrust, based in Braga, which was, at the time, the only exchangei.e, company that is authorized by the regulator in Portugal to make transactions from cryptocurrencies to legal currency. And we, Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa, were prevented from holding any kind of cryptocurrency account, we had to have accounts in euros, so we had to resort to an external authority”, explained Martinho.

However, the fact is that the company where – by “coincidence” – the son of the then SCML provider worked was notin 2022, the only company authorized by the Bank of Portugal to carry out cryptocurrency-to-currency transactions.

In reality, Utrust was just the fourth company to be authorized by the regulator in Portugal, as evidenced in the list of registered entities for carrying out activities with virtual assets in the site from the Bank of Portugal. Utrust has been registered in March 2022 and began activity in June 2023.

Previously, companies had already been authorized Mind The Coin, Bitcoin Market and Luso Digital Assetsall registered in June 2021 and starting activity in July 2021. The three are headquartered in Braga, Lisbon and Funchal, respectively, as seen in the Banco de Portugal list.

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