The State Attorney General submitted his resignation to the Government on Monday. Álvaro García Ortiz sent a letter this Monday to the Minister of Justice, Félix Bolaños, in which he asks the Council of Ministers to fire him. “It is an act owed not only to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, but to all Spanish citizens,” we read in the letter to which EL PAÍS had access. García Ortiz took this step after learning, last Thursday, of the Supreme Court ruling that condemns him to a two-year ban from office for the crime of revealing secrets and imposes a fine of 7,200 euros and the payment of compensation of 10,000 euros to the entrepreneur Alberto González Amador, partner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso and tried for fraud at the Treasury.
In the letter sent to Bolaños, García Ortiz explains that his decision to bring forward his resignation before the Supreme Court carries out the disqualification is due to his “deep respect” for judicial resolutions and his “ever-present desire to protect the Spanish Prosecutor’s Office”. “Although my determination derives directly from the sentence notified to me, to my credit I am convinced that I have faithfully served the institution to which I am honored to belong, with an unequivocal vocation to public service, sense of duty and institutional loyalty.”
The dismissal will not become effective until it is accepted by the Council of Ministers, expected this Tuesday, and is published in the Official State Gazette (BOE). García Ortiz could have remained in office until the Supreme Court has notified the sentence with the arguments that led to his conviction (for now he has only made the sentence public), since it will be then that the sentence will come into force. But the Attorney General chose to bring forward his departure by taking advantage of Article 31.1 a) of the Organic Statute of the Attorney General’s Office (EOMF), which provides that the State Attorney General may resign “at his request.”
Now the Government will have to appoint a new head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which will be the fourth since Pedro Sánchez arrived in La Moncloa in June 2018. Before García Ortiz there were María José Segarra and Dolores Delgado, who also resigned, but in his case, due to health problems. In the meantime, the functions of attorney general will be assumed by the deputy prosecutor of the Supreme Court, Ángeles Sánchez Conde, number two in the fiscal leadership. Sánchez Conde was the one who, during the investigations and trial against García Ortiz, carried out the functions of public prosecutor and asked for the acquittal of who until now had been his direct superior.
In his first public appearance after the Supreme Court’s conviction, this Sunday, the President of the Government assured that the process to relieve García Ortiz is already underway and, although he did not provide clear clues about the names, Executive sources have indicated in recent days that he will clearly be a progressive and a person with a strong profile to deal with a very delicate situation. “The government has always proposed people like García, with vast experience, with important knowledge of the subject. We recognize the work that Álvaro García has done, it has been very positive”, said Sánchez, who expressed his discomfort with the sentence and also trusted that “other instances”, in reference to the Constitutional Court or European justice, “can resolve aspects of this sentence that could be controversial”.
García Ortiz has maintained his innocence from the beginning and denied having leaked the email under investigation. At the trial, during his testimony as an investigator, the chief prosecutor assured that neither he nor anyone around him had leaked the email. “The truth is not leaked, the truth is defended,” he said. The attorney general refused to resign throughout the trial, but the two-year ban imposed by the Supreme Court forces him to leave office.
It is not possible to bring an ordinary appeal against that sentence, but only an annulment incident, an extraordinary procedure to demand the annulment of a judicial decision for violation of fundamental rights, but it would be the Supreme Court itself that would have to resolve the issue and the chances of success are very remote. Having exhausted his options before the High Court, García Ortiz’s only option would be to appeal for protection to the Constitutional Court if he believes his constitutional rights have been violated.
The sentence imposed by the Supreme Court is lower than that requested by the charges, which included four to six years of imprisonment and up to 12 years of disqualification. The crime for which García Ortiz was convicted, 417 paragraph 1, of the Penal Code, punishes the authority or public official “who reveals secrets or information of which he is aware by reason of his work or his position and which must not be disclosed”. The penalty for this crime is a fine of twelve to eighteen months and special disqualification from working or holding public offices from one to three years, but in its aggravated form it can lead to imprisonment from one to three years and disqualification from three to five years. The court chose to remain in the mid-range of the basic rate for the disqualification sentence, two years, and the minimum sentence for the fine (12 months with a daily rate of 20 euros).
