Sócrates’ lawyer’s wife tweets “secrets” and then wipes account clean

The scandal that has split the country into those who think former PM José Sócrates is squeaky clean and those who affirm that he is anything but took a new turn as the jailed Socialist’s lawyer’s wife tweeted some rather extraordinary “secrets”.
Alda Telles went on Twitter to denounce the whole concept of the nation’s secrecy of Justice, calling it “the McGuffin of the B-series movie that is Portugal”.
Demonstrating that she is every bit as unconventional as her husband João Araújo, Telles revealed that “curiously, during the entire interrogation, none of the defendants were confronted with one single concrete fact of corruption”.
Ending the tweet with an ingenuous “oops”, Telles pointed out that without a crime on the table “for example corruption, there cannot be money-laundering. Oops”
Her unorthodox tweets elicited a torrent of criticism from those who suggested she was breaking the secrecy of justice, to which the media consultant retorted with her McGuffin remark: “Secrecy of Justice? That McGuffin of the series B film that is Portugal,” she queried.
The tweet either suggests Ms Telles has little respect for Portugal’s secrecy of Justice, or that she feels it has already been irreparably broken by the constant media reports of cases that should, after all, be conducted away from the eyes of the nation’s press.
But whatever Ms Telles’ motivation, her remarks have now all been wiped from her Twitter account.
Confronted by Observador website, Telles has also denied that she violated any secrecy laws.
It is an episode that will leave bystanders further perplexed by the workings of Portuguese justice.
As former PM José Sócrates remains behind bars at Évora’s jail, with newspapers carrying stories on everything he eats to the details of his bathroom plumbing, Telles’ husband has already told reporters he will be lodging an appeal against the detention, which he claims is an “injustice”.
Araújo cut something of a comic figure during his client’s interrogation at Campus de Justiça, and left people wondering as to his legal abilities.
Initially, the 65-year-old told reporters he was a “trainee” and that he was in the area “looking at shop windows”.
As those who knew him told Expresso, he is “not experienced at dealing with journalists”.
Meantime, one who is is the President of the Republic. But as the country has been aware, Cavaco Silva is carefully guarding his words over the detention of José Sócrates.
In Abu Dhabi yesterday he gave a short statement to journalists, looking less than animated, and saying that Portugal had a “very good” image abroad and that he hoped this latest scandal would not alter that image “significantly”. In fact, he hoped it wouldn’t alter Portugal’s image at all, he said – stressing that Portugal’s institutions have simply “shown themselves to be working with all normality”.
With a posse of microphones poised to catch his words, Cavaco Silva stressed that he had no wish “to add anything more to the matter” as he “respects the principle of the separation of powers”.