“He is a private citizen who is being besieged by all the power of a State because he is my partner (…). “He is undergoing a savage inspection.” It was the first reaction of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid, to the revelation by elDiario.es about her partner’s tax fraud that the Prosecutor’s Office had reported. That day, March 13, 2024, the head of the Madrid Executive stood in front of the cameras to exonerate businessman Alberto González Amador and denounce an alleged institutional conspiracy against her commanded by the Government of Pedro Sánchez and his related press.
Nine months later, his strategy hasn’t changed. Furthermore, he has placed at the center of his criticism the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, whom his partner accuses in court of giving the order to publish communications between his defense and the prosecutor who denounced him for having defrauded 350,000 euros. . The leader of the PP, like other barons of the party, has not come out to publicly defend González Amador, whose behavior many popular leaders consider inadmissible, but he has taken the opportunity to charge against García Ortiz, with whom Feijóo has had a latent confrontation since the time in which the current attorney general was the deputy prosecutor for the Environment in Galicia.
All on account of the fire policy of the and memories that always ruled out the existence of organized networks that took over the Galician forests.
The reports from the Prosecutor’s Office that each year dismantled the accusations launched in the summer by Feijóo and other popular leaders placed García Ortiz in the crosshairs of the PP, which falsely accused him of participating in socialist rallies. In reality, it was a conference organized by the PSdeG in which García Ortiz participated as an expert in fire investigation, along with other technicians, representing the UPF and after asking permission from the State Prosecutor’s Office.
The clash with the then environmental prosecutor has continued to this day on the part of Feijóo and his core leadership. One of the latest examples was seen last week, when the leader of the PP pointed out the attorney general as the instigator of the decision of the Valencia Prosecutor’s Office to support a criminal investigation into the DANA management of the president of the Valencian Generalitat, Carlos Mazón. , and his Government. In an informal conversation with journalists, Feijóo assured that before this statement was announced, the Valencian prosecutors “had lunch” with García Ortiz. The assumption that this writing had been agreed upon had been published that same morning by the online OkDiario.
“If I were attorney general of the State, I would worry more about myself than about Valencia,” said the PP leader. Nor was he the only leader of the conservative party that has recently attacked the highest representative of the Public Ministry. His right-hand man in Congress, Miguel Tellado, also referred to this alleged plot. The parliamentary spokesperson expressly assured that the letter from the Valencia Prosecutor’s Office is “one more maneuver” by García Ortiz. “A very crude maneuver,” he added.
Ayuso’s insults
Feijóo and Tellado have not been the only ones who have recently charged against García Ortiz. “It is evident that more than one person is going to go forward,” Ayuso said in an interview on Telecinco, using the same informal expression that his chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, used to announce the opening of a case a week in advance. to investigate whether the attorney general leaked emails between González Amador’s lawyer and the prosecutor investigating him.
Part of those emails—which García Ortiz denies having disseminated—had already been previously disclosed by Rodríguez, who has been personally involved in the defense of the commission agent. However, that is by no means a problem for Ayuso. “I don’t have to give explanations like this. What I know is who has the right to filter and who does not,” he said, referring to the highest representative of the Public Ministry.
On his social networks, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez himself, a public official who receives almost 100,000 euros a year from the Community of Madrid for serving all citizens, has spread threatening messages against García Ortiz. “Attorney General: if you call me to testify you are going to go ahead!!!”, he wrote on November 12. In another previous message he called him a “mafioso” and a “Stalinist.”
Ayuso has also raised the tone against the attorney general, even resorting to insults. On October 17, one day after the Supreme Court opened a case against García Ortiz He called him “cheeky” in a speech at the Madrid Assembly. He assured that he is a person without “honor or any type of prestige”, since he obeys “the obsessions” of Sánchez with Ayuso herself. And he added that his partner is a victim of “all the powers of the State” and has seen “his right to defense violated” and has been “condemned politically and in the media with ridicule for a year.”
Months earlier, in June, the Madrid president described García de Ortiz as a “shame” and a “henchman” of Pedro Sánchez after the members of the Board of Court Prosecutors, one of the bodies that make up the leadership of the career prosecutor, will minimally support his criteria of requesting that the amnesty be applied to all crimes linked to the 1-O referendum.
“The vote that took place in the Board of Court Prosecutors, at the hands of a prosecutor who has never garnered any prestige, but who today is a shame and a real danger to the career, shows us the seriousness of the moment,” said the chairwoman. “They believe they go unpunished because they know that, once the separation of powers in Spain is over, Sánchez will change the rules of the game and, in addition, will forgive his henchman for any absurdity, as he will do with the ETA prisoners or with the separatist coup plotters,” said.
Ayuso’s statements against the attorney general began to intensify following the complaint that a Madrid prosecutor filed against her partner last March for not paying the Treasury the percentage that corresponded to him after pocketing a commission of almost two million euros. for the purchase and sale of medical supplies in the middle of the pandemic.
That of González Amador, however, is what is known as a textbook case: the Treasury detected false invoices, the alleged front men declared that there were no jobs and the next inevitable step was the complaint from the Prosecutor’s Office. In fact, the businessman ended up acknowledging that he had defrauded taxes in a letter in which he promised to pay more than half a million euros and proposed a sentence of eight months in prison, as long as it did not imply his entry into prison.
The past in Galicia
Feijóo’s animosity towards García Ortiz, however, goes back a long time. Specifically, more than six years ago, when he was president of the Xunta de Galicia and tried to justify with the theory of “arsonary terrorism” a wave of fires that devastated the region in September 2017 and caused four deaths. His campaign was so notorious that the then Environmental Prosecutor, Álvaro García Ortiz, publicly denied the existence of evidence that would allow inferring that there was a plot behind the fires.
After the prosecutor’s statements dismantling the theories of the Galician president, the response came in the form of a campaign to participate in a round table organized by the PSOE on one of its specialties, precisely forest fires, and in which university professors also participated. . The PP and its related media then went so far as to say that García Ortiz had participated in a socialist rally. In reality, it was a round table organized by the PSOE on forest fires, in which university professors and economists also sat and which addressed technical issues related to fire prevention.
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