The Supreme Court has decided open a criminal case against the State Attorney General for the leak of the emails in which Alberto González Amadorpartner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, admitted having defrauded more than 350,000 euros. For the first time in history, a court will investigate the leadership of the Prosecutor’s Office for a crime of revealing secrets and will do so for a case that began with a hoax from the mobile phone of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, right-hand man of the president of the Community of Madrid, who has been personally involved in his defense.
elDiario.es published exclusively on March 12 of this year that González Amador had been reported by the Prosecutor’s Office for a double tax fraud of 350,951 euros committed between 2020 and 2021. The businessman in the health sector concocted a network of false invoices to drastically reduce the tax bill of his company and pay much less money than it should for Corporate Tax after collecting several million euros in commissions from sales of medical equipment during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.
A day later, several media outlets published false information suggesting that the prosecutor who had investigated and denounced him, Julián Salto, had offered a deal to González Amador. Others added that the operation had been paralyzed “by orders from above.” In other words, the Attorney General’s Office had frustrated an agreement that would have allowed the case to be closed much faster, with much less noise and without Díaz Ayuso’s partner risking going to jail.
The information about the pact offer was published by media como The World, Digital Freedom, The Debate either Vozpópuliwhich cited sources “from around” Díaz Ayuso. As this newspaper explained, hours before it had been Miguel Ángel Rodríguez who had sent several journalists an amputated email to show that the prosecutor who investigated González Amador tried to reach an agreement with him to avoid the trial but that they were “orders from above” that stopped this conformity.
Almost in parallel, the Madrid president’s chief of staff began an offensive against the media that reported on the case: threatened to close elDiario.es and was invented that some journalists from this medium had came hooded to the president’s home and also pointed out two reporters from The Country.
The conversations between González Amador’s lawyer and the prosecutor were real but everything had happened the other way around. It had been the businessman who had written to the Public Prosecutor’s Office by mail to offer an agreement long before the usual time to do so. And the prosecutor in the case, Julián Salto, had explained to him that this was feasible even if the rest of the defendants did not want to agree. But neither the offer had arisen from the Prosecutor’s Office nor had this possible conciliation agreement been aborted from the highest levels to seek a long and tortuous process for González Amador.
Various media outlets, including elDiario.es, published how the events had occurred and also part of the content of the emails they had exchanged. It was hours later, at 10:22 in the morning on March 14, when the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office sent a statement detailing what these conversations had been like. Since then, the Public Ministry has always defended that its objective was not to reveal confidential data about the case but to deny false information that cast suspicion on its actions. Everything ended up in the hands of the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid when González Amador’s defense filed a complaint against the Prosecutor’s Office for the statement.
An investigation against the Prosecutor’s Office
The Illustrious Bar Association of Madrid (ICAM) joined a criminal offensive against the Public Ministry, which at no time addressed the possibility that a first partial leak of that email came precisely from Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s environment and specifically from her chief of staff. The Superior Court of Justice opened proceedings during which Judge Francisco José Goyena rejected the possibility of investigating beyond the statement.
Within the framework of these investigations, several prosecutors came to testify as witnesses. Among them, prosecutor Salto, who declared that on the night of March 13 he received two calls from the provincial chief prosecutor, who informed him that the attorney general had called concerned about a press report about a compliance agreement. And that she asked him for all the emails exchanged with González Amador’s defense, which he provided to her. This prosecutor confirmed these facts and assured that the emails had been requested from the State Attorney General’s Office and that she was in charge of sending them.
For her part, the senior prosecutor of the Community of Madrid, Almudena Lastra, who has been in conflict with García Ortiz for months, delivered WhatsApp messages that he sent her on March 13 and in which he ordered her to refute the hoaxes published in various media. Furthermore, in her statement as a witness, she stated that she had refused to accept the note by including the data of the internal communications between prosecutor Salto and González Amador’s defense, but that she understood that the attorney general gave her an order, to imperative nature “we have to get it out now.”
The statement is not investigated
The proceedings have fallen into the hands of the magistrate Angel Hurtadoone of the latest additions to the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, from the National Court where he opposed Mariano Rajoy testifying in the Gürtel case since the Popular Party was condemned as a lucrative participant in the plot. The case, in line with what the Prosecutor’s Office has stated these months, will not investigate the statement from the Public Ministry on the case of Alberto González Amador, but will investigate the previous leak of the emails that his defense exchanged with prosecutor Salto.
For the Chamber that signed the admission of the reasoned statement, the statement of March 14 did not include any data that had not already been published by the media. But the certainty that hours before the attorney general had demanded to have the emails, according to the judges, makes it mandatory to investigate whether it was García Ortiz or the chief provincial prosecutor of Madrid, Pilar Rodríguez, who leaked those emails to the media.
The Supreme Court has left in the hands of Judge Hurtado the only procedure to which it clearly points and that is the summons as a defendant of the attorney general and the leader of the Public Ministry in Madrid. Waiting to know if at some point the initial and partial publication of those contacts between González Amador’s lawyer and the Prosecutor’s Office in media that cited sources close to Isabel Díaz Ayuso is also investigated.
The judicial process has had the external intervention of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, author of the initial hoax with information from those same emails. Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff used his social network account a week before that the Supreme Court ordered the opening of proceedings against him. Some words that were not liked at all in the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court. This Wednesday, minutes after the court’s decision to open its own investigation was revealed, he sent another message: “Go ahead”.
For the moment, the investigating judge has not made any move regarding the most foreseeable procedure: the summons as a defendant of Álvaro García Ortiz. But the state attorney general has already announced in a statement that he has no intention of resigning and that these proceedings are presented as a battle to defend the right of citizens to receive truthful information from the Prosecutor’s Office, and the capacity of this organization to defend itself against “hoaxes or falsehoods” that compromise “the image of the institution and several of its members.”
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