After five hearings, attending the trial almost in silence with his lawyers, the state attorney general took the stand this afternoon to defend his innocence. Álvaro García Ortiz denied having leaked the email in which the lawyer of Alberto González Amador, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner and tried for tax fraud, admitted to the Prosecutor’s Office the commission of two crimes against the Treasury. He didn’t even send it to the SER chainearly media alluding to this e-mailnor to any other journalist, García Ortiz assured. As he did throughout the investigation, he admitted his responsibility in the other document on which the investigation focuses, the press release issued to deny the falsehoods that Ayuso’s entourage spread about the negotiations between González Amador and the Prosecutor’s Office. But he denied that this statement contained personal data about Ayuso’s partner that should have been omitted. “This is an institutional response from the Spanish Prosecutor’s Office to the news that calls into question the work of the Economic Crimes Prosecutor’s Office (…),” said García Ortiz, who defended his actions on the night the investigation focuses on: “My obsession is to protect the Prosecutor’s Office.”
With García Ortiz’s declaration, the trial against the State Attorney General enters its final phase. The head of the public prosecutor made use of the right that the Supreme Court already recognizes to all defendants to make statements at the end of the hearing, once all the witnesses have appeared and the evidence accepted by the court has been carried out. For five hearings, García Ortiz followed the trial on the witness stand, alongside the State Attorney’s Office, which carries out his defense, and wore the robe of attorney general. But this afternoon he abandoned that position and took off his robe to sit in the center of the room and testify as a suspect.
The head of the public prosecutor refused to respond to the popular and private accusations made by Ayuso’s partner. And he dedicated the first minutes of his appearance to explaining the reasons that led him to make this decision. He assured that González Amador omitted relevant data in the complaint that gave rise to the case, such as that the email investigated and sent by his lawyer, “had already been forwarded on the same day, February 2, to a third party, belonging to an institution that was not part of the trial at that time”, in reference to the State Prosecutor’s Office; or that “he who first reveals the e-mail” One of the prosecutors is González Amador himself, who forwarded to Ayuso’s chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, an email sent by the prosecutor to his lawyer and authorized him to release it to the media. “It is possible that if it had been known from the beginning it could have changed the course of the proceedings,” said the Attorney General, for whom the private prosecutor’s office acted “disloyally” not only against the Attorney General, “but against the court and the investigating magistrate.”
Without questions about the charges, the chief prosecutor’s statement was limited to questions from the prosecutor’s office and his defense. The Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court raised only two questions:
-Did you send the February 2nd email to people other than the Prosecutor’s Office?
-NO
-Is it ratified in the statement before the instructor dated January 29, 2025?
-Yes
Once this procedure was clarified, it was State Attorney José Ignacio Ocio who approached García Ortiz to give him the opportunity to detail what happened between March 7, 2024 – when García Ortiz learned from his press manager that the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office had denounced a businessman who turned out to be Ayuso’s associate for tax fraud – and March 14 – when the Prosecutor’s Office published the press release which included a chronology of events made by the emails exchanged between González Amador’s lawyer and the prosecutor who had reported him, Julián Salto.
At that time, García Ortiz’s statement was blocked especially on the afternoon of March 13, following a phone call from Madrid’s chief prosecutor, Almudena Lastra, in which she warned him that Ayuso’s head of cabinet was spreading among journalists that the Public Prosecutor had offered a deal to González Amador’s lawyer, but then withdrew it “by order from above”, presumably in reference to the Attorney General’s Office. “It’s the first time Lastra has called me since I became Attorney General of the State,” underlined García Ortiz to underline the extraordinary nature of the situation.
An hour after that conversation, at 9.59pm, The world published an article that reports the version from which Lastra had warned García Ortiz and cites an email sent on March 12 by the public prosecutor to González Amador’s lawyer in which the former showed himself willing to reach an agreement. The head of the Public Prosecutor assured that it was then that he learned that the Prosecutor’s Office and the lawyer had exchanged e-mail and ordered them to be collected to reconstruct what happened. “I want to know what happened and the case was brought against the couriers. And we decided to defend the actions of the prosecutors, which are absolutely impeccable,” he stressed.
García Ortiz recalled that it was a “dynamic” night on an information level and that, while they were collecting the emails, he received information that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez continued to spread “insidiousness and slander” in messages to journalists and on his Twitter account, which convinced them that it was necessary for the Prosecutor’s Office to clarify the incident with a press release.
During the statement, García Ortiz justified his decision to delete all texts and emails from his devices. A leak from his communications, he assured, could “put many people in this country in danger.” “I am very aware of this, which is why I do systematic deletions, I do not allow the information contained in a chat that may contain professional information or institutional relationships to remain on my WhatsApp for more than a month,” he underlined.
His last words were borrowed from a person who attended the afternoon session at the hearing and who approached him before the start of the session: “The truth is not filtered, the truth is defended.”
