Juan Lobato and Pilar Sánchez Acera, former senior PSOE officials in Madrid, assured on Wednesday that they had not received from the State Attorney General the letter from the lawyer of Isabel Díaz’s partner Ayuso, of whom Álvaro García Ortiz is accused. The former leader of the Madrid PSOE and its former head of institutional policies, who was also a senior La Moncloa official at the time, testified in the ongoing trial before the Supreme Court, in which the prosecution sought to prove that it was García Ortiz who sent the email to the government and the PSOE. But Sánchez Acera, who was the one who sent a screenshot of the document to Lobato, assured that that image did not come to him from anyone from La Moncloa or the Prosecutor’s Office, but from a journalist.
The relationship between Lobato and Sánchez Acera with the trial opened against García Ortiz has its origins in November 2024, when the then leader of the Madrid PSOE recorded in front of a notary an exchange of messages he had had with his party partner on the morning of March 14, a few hours after the email in which the lawyer of the entrepreneur Alberto González Amador admitted the commission of two tax crimes was leaked. THE whatsapp that Lobato, now a senator, took to a notary shows that Sánchez Acera sent him a screenshot with the text of that e-mail early in the morning, when the content of the email had already been released by the various media, but the image had not yet been reproduced. The decision of the then leader of the Madrid socialists to make this conversation public caused an earthquake in the regional PSOE which ended with his resignation.
The possibility of extending the investigation for disclosure of secrets opened against the State Attorney General in La Moncloa had been on the table for months by judge Ángel Hurtado. The judge has attempted to explore this avenue since he learned of the notarial recording of Lobato’s messages, who he called as a witness on the same day as ABC published this information. After his testimony, the judge summoned Sánchez Acera, who he considered indictable, although he ultimately ruled out this possibility. However, in the statement of facts of the order with which he prosecuted the attorney general, the judge argued that García Ortiz acted “following the instructions received from the Presidency of the Government”. But Hurtado did not explain what data supported this theory, and the Appeals Chamber modified and eliminated this statement from the facts on which the chief prosecutor is judged.
However, the court accepted the prosecution’s request to summon Lobato and Sánchez Acera to the trial, in case they revealed that it was García Ortiz who sent them the document with the contents of the complaint. e-mail. Although the private prosecution, brought forward by Ayuso’s partner, tried to recover the thesis according to which the public prosecutor acted on Moncloa’s orders and focused much of the interrogation on this. The president of the court, Andrés Martínez Arrieta, has repeatedly called his attention for having stopped in that “context”. “This part of the case was rejected by the Appeals Chamber,” he recalled, although the lawyer continued with the questions he had asked without departing from his thesis.
The prosecution also tried to find a loophole in the answers of the two witnesses that would allow them to underline that it was the Attorney General who had provided that document to the PSOE and the Government (Sánchez Acera was then a senior official in the Presidency) as part of a state operation to attack Isabel Díaz Ayuso for her partner’s legal problems. But Lobato and Sánchez Acera’s responses didn’t help raise this possibility in court either.
The former leader of the regional PSOE assured that he never received “instructions” or “orders” from La Moncloa, beyond the fact that there was coordination for the political messages they wanted to send on national issues. “I received recommendations and advice, not instructions or orders,” he stressed. Lobato, who presented the document in the plenary session of the Madrid Assembly that morning, framed this action as part of a common political strategy. “Evidently it was the topic of the day,” he noted, referring to the fact that the Prosecutor’s Office’s complaint against Ayuso’s partner for tax fraud had been known for less than 48 hours and less than 12 hours since it was revealed that his lawyer was seeking a settlement agreement.
In messages exchanged on March 14, 2024, Lobato asked her fellow party member how she obtained the document and warned her that it appeared the Prosecutor’s Office had forwarded it to her, to which she replied “it’s in the media.” When questioned about this, the former leader of the Madrid PSOE explained that this statement was not due to his distrust of the public prosecutor, but rather a question of “prudence”. Lobato assured that he did not know the origin of the image, while Sánchez Acera claimed that it came to him from a journalist, but he does not remember from whom and cannot know because he changed telephone terminal after leaving La Moncloa, in September 2024, and, in the process, all the contents of the previous device were erased.
Sánchez Acera stressed that he never had access to the email whose leak is being investigated, but rather to another document with the same content but in a different format. And he defended his actions that day as part of the control work of the Government of Madrid. “What I want is for Lobato, who is the leader of the PSOE in Madrid, in the (parliamentary) question he will ask the president, to tell her clearly that the day before he manipulated information and distorted reality,” he said and recalled that Ayuso had held a press conference “as president” in which he had said that his partner’s problems with the law were due to “persecution”. “I think Lobato has an obligation to say whether the president lied,” he noted.
