Judgement of inspector of PJ and Adriano Quintanilla postponed to day 16

A information was advanced today to the agency Lusa by the Court of Felgueiras (unique court), district of Porto, adding that the start of the trial, scheduled for Wednesday, was postponed to 10:00 of October 16, at the request of the defense of Quintanilla, boss of the former cycling team W52-FC Porto.

Calvary Várzea – a team that originated from W52-FC Porto – Adriano Quintanilha and the PJ inspector are charged with falsifying documents. Quintanilla is also accused of coercion, while the inspector will answer for personal favor.

In September 2025, the Criminal Instruction Court of Penafiel ruled (decided to bring the defendants to trial) in the exact terms of the prosecution of the Public Prosecutor (MP), after both requested the opening of instruction.

The prosecution of the MP, released by Lusa, argues that Adriano Sousa, known as Adriano Quintanilha, and the PJ inspector “decided to create” a false Code of Conduct, aiming to attest that Quintanilha and the Association Calvary Várzea, which was the origin of W52-FC Porto and of which he was president, did not know the scheme of doping in investigation in the Clean Proof process.

The document was then given to cyclists and then the sports director of the team, Nuno Ribeiro, to sign, in order to distance Adriano Quintanilha and the Association “from the then indicted conduct of the sports director of the team and its cyclists”.

The investigation follows the searches conducted in April 2022, under Operation Clean Proof.

“The defendant Adriano Sousa, alarmed by the criminal and disciplinary consequences that those conducts would entail for himself and for the Association represented by him, decided to outline a plan aimed at exempting him, you and the Association, from any possible responsibility for the facts under investigation in that process,” the prosecution said.

According to the MP, the 73-year-old businessman then contacted “his friend, who knew how to be an inspector of the Judiciary Police, to perform duties in the Northern Directorate, and who knew how to share with him the same feeling of attachment to the W52-FC team Port and cycling”.

The 57-year-old PJ inspector, “aware of what the defendant intended, decided to create and execute, in conjunction with this, a plan that would enable him to achieve the intended ends” by his friend.

In this sense, the two defendants “decided to create a document that aimed to attest that Adriano Quintanilha and the Association “unknown the practices that were under investigation” in the Clean Proof process “and that therefore no criminal, counter-ordinary or disciplinary responsibility could be assaulted”.

In possession of the document, dated January 2022, the two defendants, “always in communion with intentions, decided to hand it over to the sports director, Nuno Ribeiro, and to the cyclists of the team, in particular those who had been targeted in the searches, so that they would sign it, knowing that the date bet on the document did not correspond to the date of the preparation and signature of the document”.

According to the MP, to convince Nuno Ribeiro and cyclists to sign the document, Adriano Quintanilha claimed that “they would be protecting the cycling team, their participation as W52-FC Porto cyclists and their work”.

One of the cyclists will only have signed the document because he was threatened by Quintanilla that he would not receive the salary.

In the main proceedings of W52-FC Porto, Quintanilha and Nuno Ribeiro had been sentenced to effective sentences of four years and nine months in prison by the doping scheme. After appeal, the Port Relation Court ordered the repetition of the trial and the recasting of the judgment, for being illegal proof of Nuno Ribeiro's statements made in trial by reading a writing.