Marco António Amaro now has 10 days to consult the process, and the resumption of the trial was scheduled for March 17th.
The news of the appointment of a new unofficial defender for José Sócrates was advanced by SIC, which says that the former prime minister has until March 18th to choose a new hired lawyer, if he decides to do so.
In a note sent to the Lusa agency, in reaction to the news, José Sócrates criticized having found out about the new lawyer “on television, even before being notified by the court and given the legal deadline to appoint a new lawyer”.
“We have now reached a new level in the degradation of the rule of law – now it is the Bar Association itself that sanctions a condition of a period of ten days as the necessary time to prepare the defense”he stated.
Sócrates recalled that the process has “three hundred thousand sheets, two hundred volumes, one hundred and twenty-six attachments, two hundred and fourteen searches and four hundred hours of listening”stating that the deadline is insufficient to prepare the defense.
José Sócrates also said that the lawyer’s president “had already supported the solution of a public defender who didn’t even bother to raise the case at the court secretariat”.
José Sócrates has already had eight lawyers, four of them unofficial, in the almost 12 years that the Operation Marquês process has been going through the courts, with successive appeals.
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