The journalists who gave statements this Thursday in the Supreme Court for the publication of the email that denied the hoax of the Community of Madrid about Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner have taken advantage of professional secrecy to not reveal their sources of information. Two of those journalists are the deputy director of elDiario.es, José Precedo, and the head of Politics, Marcos Pinheiro.
The professionals were summoned as witnesses in the case in which the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, is being investigated for the alleged dissemination of confidential information of businessman Alberto González Amador, partner of the president of the Community of Madrid. His appearance occurred at the request of García Ortiz’s defense and the provincial prosecutor of Madrid, Pilar Rodríguez, who exercises State Law.
Article 20 of the Spanish Constitution recognizes the right “to freely communicate or receive truthful information through any means of dissemination” and establishes that “the law will regulate the right to the conscience clause and professional secrecy in the exercise of these freedoms.” The two informants from elDiario.es and the one from Cadena Ser, Miguel Ángel Campos, have referred to this constitutional protection of not revealing their sources on several occasions during their statements.
The journalists have explained that they accessed the email subject to the investigation before it was in the hands of García Ortiz. Campos, from Cadena Ser, explained that he obtained the email from a source at 4:00 p.m. on March 13, more than six hours before the State Attorney General had it in his possession.
José Precedo, deputy director of elDiario.es, has assured that the email, dated February 2, 2024, was among the documentation of the case that he obtained on March 6 of that year along with the complaint from the Prosecutor’s Office and the Tax Agency file. After the formation of a working group in the newspaper, the appropriate verifications and inquiries about the material received, elDiario.es published the first exclusive on the case on March 12 under the title “Ayuso’s couple defrauded the Treasury of 350,951 euros with a plot of false invoices and shell companies.”
That same night this newsroom published the second installment of the investigation where it revealed that the money from the alleged fraud came from a commission of two million that González Amador had collected for the sale of masks during the pandemic. The next day, elDiario.es published the third exclusive that revealed that the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, enjoys a second floor in the same building that is in the name of a company owned by her lawyer.
As explained by the deputy director of elDiario.es in the Supreme Court, the publication of the confession email that González Amador’s lawyer had sent to the Prosecutor’s Office was planned for a future delivery, but the dissemination of a hoax in different media generated by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, according to which there were orders from above in the Public Ministry that disrupted the plans of this medium. After trying unsuccessfully to contrast this information, which turned out to be false, elDiario.es published a first piece citing Cadena Ser, the first media outlet to deny the news disseminated by the Madrid president’s chief of staff.
Already at dawn, that March 14, he published the content of the email with the statement of the commission agent’s lawyer: “Two crimes have certainly been committed against the Public Treasury.” At noon the following day, that same March 14, after seeing the email reproduced in various media, elDiario.es ended up inserting the screenshot in two of the previously published information.
The Supreme Court investigation has proven that the attorney general had in his possession the email in which González Amador’s lawyer offered an agreement to the Prosecutor’s Office at 9:59 p.m. on March 13, seven days after, according to declared the deputy director of elDiario.es, was in the hands of this editorial team.
During his statement in the Supreme Court, then asked why he did not publish the content of that email until after El Mundo disseminated the distorted information about the pact, the journalist detailed that the newspaper tried to confirm that the email in its possession was the first in a series and that it was not part of an incomplete conversation, as was finally proven.
It was three hours after El Mundo published the false information about the Prosecutor’s pact with González Amador when elDiario.es contacted the sources involved in the case to collect their version and publish that, in reality, he was the lawyer of Ayuso’s partner who had offered that agreement to avoid going to trial.
This Thursday, a journalist from El Plural, Cynthia Coiduras, also gave a statement, signing information that also denied the hoax spread from the Community of Madrid. Judge Hurtado had also summoned two journalists from Vozpopuli and Libertad Digital, who, like El Mundo, had reported that it had been the Prosecutor’s Office who had offered a pact to González Amador so that he could avoid jail in exchange for acknowledging his crimes, when It was just the other way around.
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