When she emerged in public last week, Imelda Marcos wept and declared herself destitute. Luckily for the former First Lady of the Philippines, the Government in Manila said yesterday that she could have back a $310 million (£190 million) cache of jewellery confiscated from her 23 years ago.

The order, which provoked fury among ordinary Filipinos but may help Mrs Marcos to rebuild her notoriously excessive shoe collection, was issued because the Government forgot to lay claim officially to the jewels.

Mrs Marcos remains the legitimate owner, said Raul Gonzalez, the Justice Secretary, and there is no proof that the trinkets were ill-gotten.

Through a spokesperson, Mrs Marcos said yesterday that much of the jewellery had been intended to decorate religious images “like tiaras for the Blessed Virgin Mary”.

Human rights lawyers, who are still pursuing thousands of claims arising from the Marcos family’s long rule in the Philippines, said that they would try to block the return of the jewels.

As well as providing a windfall for the “steel butterfly” of the Philippines as she nears her 80th birthday, the order by the Justice Ministry deals a humiliating blow to the country’s anti-corruption agency.

The main goal of the Presidential Commission on Good Government is to secure the recovery of billions of dollars that were allegedly stolen from the state by the country’s late dictator, Ferdinand Marcos.

The jewellery was among an array of possessions seized in 1986 when Mr Marcos was deposed in a coup and the family fled from the opulent Malacanang presidential palace. The expensive clothes and accessories amassed by Mrs Marcos became emblematic of dictatorship at its most rapacious.

Even confronted recently with an accusation by the American magazine Newsweek that she belonged on a list of history’s greediest people — that included Genghis Khan and Bernard Madoff — Mrs Marcos cheerfully pleaded guilty.

She told local reporters: “For me, greedy is giving. I was First Lady for 20 years; you have to be greedy first to give to all. It is natural.” At the peak of her husband’s power, Mrs Marcos was numbered among the richest women in the world, but has since complained of her poverty.

She has also made much of her need to dip into her late husband’s military pension to make ends meet.

Cherry Cobarrubias, Mrs Marcos’s former spokeswoman and the founder of the True Marcos Loyalists, said: “Her hardship is not literally financial . . . The hardship is mostly emotional because of the continuous persecution she is suffering.”

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