Da Silva turned out to be a convicted forger with fake credentials and he could soon face fraud charges. Photo / Supplied
As an ex-presidential consultant, a former adviser to the World Bank, a financial researcher for the United Nations and a professor in the US, Artur Baptista da Silva's outspoken attacks on Portugal's austerity cuts made the bespectacled 61-year-old one of the country's leading media pundits last year.
The only problem
was that Baptista da Silva is none of the above.
He turned out to be a convicted forger with fake credentials and, following his spectacular hoodwinking of Portuguese society, he could soon face fraud charges.
Baptista da Silva's conversion into the latest must-interview figure on the media circuit began when he turned up last April at Lisbon's main philanthropic institution, the Academia do Bacalhau, with a supply of business cards - which, it later turned out, bore false credentials - and an impressive-sounding dissertation entitled Growth, Inequality and Poverty: Looking Beyond Averages which, it also transpired, was "borrowed" from its writer, a World Bank employee, via the internet.
At the time, Baptista da Silva also claimed to be a social economics professor at Milton College - a private university in Wisconsin, US, which actually closed in 1982 - and to be masterminding a UN research project into the effects of the recession on southern European countries. He even, some reports say, tried to pass himself off as a former adviser to Portugal's President, Joaio Sampaio, and the World Bank.
