Why was the State Attorney General convicted? The Supreme Court’s decision to make public the result of its deliberation on Álvaro García Ortiz without the sentence being completed prevents us, for now, from knowing not only the arguments on which the magistrates relied to convict him of the crime of revealing secrets, but also what facts exactly they attribute to him. Because one of the most controversial elements of this process is that, during the investigation in the High Court, there was some confusion as to what exactly the subject of the investigation was.
Sources consulted indicate that the judges believe that the revelation of “confidential data” extends both to an email sent to the Prosecutor’s Office by the lawyer of Alberto González Amador – partner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso and prosecuted for tax fraud – to launch a compliance proposal that would reduce his sentence, and to the press release issued by the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office to deny the false version that Ayuso’s entourage was spreading about those conversations between the prosecutors and her lawyer partner.
The press release is at the origin of the complaint that brought García Ortiz to court and focused, for months, on the first investigation opened at the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid (TSJM), which ended up taking the case to the Supreme Court after the Attorney General sent him a letter taking responsibility for drafting the statement. However, the court that heard the case to decide whether to prosecute García Ortiz (consisting of five of the seven magistrates who tried him) found that the statement, “apparently”, did not contain “inappropriately revealed information”, since all the data it contained was publicly known through the press.
But the court then gave another argument to investigate the Attorney General: from the investigation conducted by the TSJ and, in particular, from the statement of the prosecutor who filed the complaint against Ayuso’s partner, Julián Salto, it was clear that the emails between the prosecutor and González Amador’s lawyer which contained most of the data later reported in the note had been revealed hours before the publication of the statement, when the e-mail They were already in the possession of García Ortiz, who had claimed them to prepare the note.
From that moment on, the investigation focused on the dissemination of one of those emails, sent by the lawyer on February 2, 2024, in which he admitted that his client had committed two tax crimes. To try to find evidence about the leak, the investigator, Judge Ángel Hurtado, ordered the Guardia Civil to search the offices and copy all the contents of the phones and computers of García Ortiz and the chief provincial prosecutor of Madrid, Pilar Rodríguez, also accused by the Supreme Court. But this action did not provide clear evidence of the accusation because the attorney general had deleted all the contents of her devices and there was no trace on those of the provincial prosecutor to indicate that she or García Ortiz had leaked the information to the press. e-mail of the lawyer.
The investigation continued, apparently focused on the emails, but, during the interrogation of the Attorney General, already at the end of January 2025, the judge explained that he was investigating not only the leak of the email, but also the press release and even how the tax file of the partner of the president of Madrid had arrived elDiario.es (first media to publish the news). In response to the lawyers’ protests, the instructor argued that the case had changed during the course of the investigation.
In the resolution with which he prosecuted García Ortiz, Hurtado emphasized that the information was not criminal in itself, but was in “unity of act” with the email leak. This is the thesis brought to the trial by the popular prosecution, which accuses García Ortiz of having leaked the email in which the lawyer admits that Ayuso’s partner committed two tax crimes in order to be able, in this way, to include that information in the press release with the excuse that it was no longer secret because it was published by the media.
Already during the hearing, when asked especially about the accusations, the statement monopolized some of the questioning, to the point that the attorney general’s lawyer complained in his final report about the confusion that existed on this issue. “We don’t know what we are defending ourselves from (…) I still don’t know if I should defend myself from the note or simply from the leak,” he complained.
After the hearing and the announcement of the sentence against García Ortiz, the impression spread in legal circles that the note will have more prominence in the sentence than it had during the investigation. Article 417 of the penal code, for which García Ortiz was convicted, punishes “the authority or public official who reveals secrets or information of which he is aware by reason of his work or position and which must not be disclosed”. Although the Supreme Court stated a year ago that the note, “apparently”, did not constitute a crime, the ruling advanced by the court opens the door for magistrates to have now considered that the leak of the email and the drafting of the note constitute a single act and that the inclusion of the details of the note in the minutes e-mail implies having violated the confidentiality of the conversations between González Amador’s lawyer and the Prosecutor’s Office
Unlike what happens with email filtering, There is no clear evidence of García Ortiz’s authorship; in the case of the note, the Attorney General himself took responsibility from day one. And he also did so during his testimony at the trial, in which he defended his decision to include in that statement the chronology of the exchange of messages between the Prosecutor’s Office and the lawyer. “If you skip an email you can’t do a history,” he said. If the magistrates now believed that this note revealed confidential information that García Ortiz should not have revealed, the court would not have needed any evidence to know who the perpetrator of the crime was.
