General Chat

This may be the end of the line for the long-running civil case taken out by the parents of Madeleine McCann to ‘silence’ their bête-noir, former PJ coordinator Gonçalo Amaral.
After all the hullaballoo and recriminations filling UK tabloids, Supreme court judge Dr Jorge Manuel Roque Nogueira has rejected the complaint lodged by Kate and Gerry McCann over what they considered a frivolous decision by fellow judges to uphold Gonçalo Amaral’s right to freedom of expression, sanctioning the intrinsic legality of his damning thesis ‘Maddie: the Truth of the Lie’.
Roque Nogueira’s decision, taken earlier today and published in PDF format online, means that Amaral has won the case for the third and possibly final time.
There is no higher court in Portugal to which the McCanns can take this fight - and the grounds for appeal to the European Court of Human Rights are “highly dubious”, said a source, particularly as Supreme Court judges referred to tenets set out by the ECHR in their 75-page deliberation.
For Amaral who has remained silent through this last tense stand-off over the Supreme Court ruling in January, the decision today means that finally his assets and property should be ‘unfrozen’, allowing him to return to the full control of his life.
As blogwriter Joana Morais has commented, Roque Nogueira’s decision came “sooner than we expected” and was “no doubt due to the weaknesses of the reasoning presented in the request for annulment of the Supreme Court’s ruling”.
For now, there has been no reaction from either the McCanns in UK, or their Portuguese legal team over here.
UK tabloids appear not yet to have the news

. (taken from the internet )

they should keep their mouths shut - but that seems impossible for them - initially when Maddie went missing I was so upset for them but no longer - they lost my sympathy a long time ago when they boarded the publicity wagon - selfish self centred parents who left their small children while they dined out -something I would never ever have done

So true Ann I agree :-( :-(

Since news that the parents of Madeleine McCann have lost their third court bid for damages against former PJ coordinator Gonçalo Amaral, relative silence has settled over the British media.
Only one tabloid appears to be flying provocative headlines, while it has been left to a fringe news site to put them into ‘journalese’.
The Daily Star proclaimed yesterday that the “Fund set up to find missing Madeleine Mccann could be wiped out”.
Radaronline ran with the far more sensationalist assertion that parents Kate and Gerry “are facing bankruptcy”.
The truth is possibly somewhere in between - which, as Portuguese tabloid Correio da Manhã admits, “will be expensive” whatever the final amount.
The ruling by Supreme Court judges released last week leaves the Leicester couple liable for not only their own court costs, but those incurred by Amaral in a series of hearings.
The Star maintains that “no figure has been agreed, but it will be six figures and could use up all the cash left in the fund set up to find Madeleine, if trustees agree to release the cash”.
CM appears to have misread the Star’s story, and suggest the final figure for the couple’s court costs will be €100,000.
This could not possibly ‘wipe out’ the Find Madeleine Fund, as this stands - according to the Star - at £714,800 (or €826,000).
At no point in any of the stories following up on this protracted legal battle has there been any clue as to whether Amaral will be lodging his own civil action for damages - a possibility he has floated in the press in the past (click here).
Indeed, Amaral has been keeping his own silence as he works hard on the finishing touches of his second book on the Madeleine mystery - aimed for a publishing date at the end of April to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the child’s disappearance.
[email protected]