European Aquatics president António José Silva is living out the last 10 days of his outgoing administration at the Portuguese Swimming Federation (FPN) as a lame-duck president stripped of his position and power after a tribunal ended further efforts to delay a government order to dismiss him on integrity grounds.
In effect, one of Silva's avenues to 'clearing' his name, after the FPN was instructed to dismiss its president under Portuguese law governing sports administration, has come to a dead-end.
That is likely to lead to the reopening of a complaint against Silva lodged with the Aquatics Integrity Unit (AQIU) in January this year but placed on ice pending "new evidence".
Now the Integrity Unit has every reason to look again, the latest judicial judgment having confirmed that the complaints against Silva were neither spurious nor "settled", as some had suggested. Rather, the tribunal showed a degree of vexation in its judgment, noting the various attempts to further delay the dismissal order by the president and the FPN administration he led that is now entered its last week in power before elections this Saturday, November 16.
While he would have liked to have left office on that date at the end of his term without such a definitive ruling against him, Silva has now lost his last chance to do so. The last line of a 16-page ruling at the Tribunal Administrativo e Fiscal de Sintra last Wednesday reads simply:
Decision
Under the terms and for the reasons set out:
I judge the instance dismissed due to the supervening futility of the dispute.
Costs borne by the Claimants.
The "dispute" boiled down to persistent attempts by Silva and his leadership ensemble at the FPN to delay an order from the nation's highest sports authority, the Portuguese Institute of Sport and Youth (IPDJ), for the aquatics regulator to dismiss Silva on integrity grounds after a five-month government inquiry into questions posed by a whistleblower concluded that his behaviour was incompatible with leadership of a national sports federation.
Under national law, the IPDJ has the power to order the removal of any official ruled to have fallen shy of required standards.
The Sintra tribunal's ruling, which does not consider the issues that led to the IPDJ's order of dismissal but simply the delaying moves of Silva and the FPN, brought Silva's role at the federation to an effective end on Wednesday.
