Judges open door to sentence ‘suspension’ due to Alzheimer’s
The agonising saga of whether or not former BES banking president Ricardo Salgado should go to jail for his crimes – now that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease – saw a little more humanity break into the picture yesterday when Supreme Court judges confirmed his eight year jail term (for just some of the crimes levelled against him) but ‘opened the door’ to its suspension.
Mr Salgado’s wife Maria João only recently walked her husband by the hand into court, and explained to journalists exactly how his day-to-day has descended, since prosecutions began raining down on him.
“I used to have a fantastic husband”, she said. “Now I have a big baby” – who even gets lost in his own home.
How anyone could imagine punishing a man in this condition is what has seen his defence team already make numerous appeals for the various cases against their client to be thrown out.
According to his wife, the only way she could see him sent to jail is if he ‘drops dead on the spot’ (as he couldn’t cope with incarceration for a moment).
For now, it is being left to yet another (this will be the third) medical evaluation of Mr Salgado’s medical condition – this time to be ordered by the initial court that heard the three crimes of abuse of confidence, for which he was first condemned to six years behind bars, increased on appeal to eight.
According to reports, the intention of the new evaluation will be to establish whether Mr Salgado’s “psychic anomaly” prevents him from “understanding the purpose of the penalty” (the reason for taking him away from his carer/wife, and leaving him in a jail cell).
Mr Salgado, 79, still faces “various other criminal processes” (including BES and EDP), but if the new medical evaluation ends with the suspension of his jail term, the understanding will be that there is no point going through any more (which is precisely what the defence has been arguing for some years now).
