The defense of the State Attorney General continued during the morning of today’s trial by insisting on its main argument: Álvaro García Ortiz did not reveal any secrets and that day he gathered information on Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner, Alberto González Amador and on his possible deal with the prosecutor’s office for alleged tax fraud in a defensive way: to stop the hoaxes that were launched from the environment of the president of the Community of Madrid. Mar Hedo, press manager of the State Attorney General’s Office, explained that on March 6 (seven days before the email from the defense of Ayuso’s boyfriend was leaked) he received the first phone call from a journalist to find out if they knew of the existence of a case against Alberto González Amador and explained that the case was acquiring a huge media dimension, especially after the president of the Community of Madrid publicly attacked the chief provincial prosecutor.
“On March 12, Ayuso began to cast a shadow of suspicion on the provincial prosecutor and, by extension, on the entire prosecutor’s office.” On the night of the 13th, the alleged email leak occurred which denied a previous hoax by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez and previous distorted information by The worldaccording to which the Prosecutor’s Office had offered a deal to the partner of the PP leader (while in reality the opposite had happened).
Hedo also specified that a journalist from EL PAÍS asked him on March 12, that is, almost 32 hours before the public prosecutor received the email, if he had information on this possible agreement. His version coincides with that provided during the investigation by four editors of this newspaper, cited as witnesses, who told the judge that they had learned, at noon on March 12, 2024, from fiscal sources at the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid, that the lawyer of the Ayuso couple intended to reach an agreement with the public prosecutor which implied that his client would return the defrauded sum plus a fine in exchange for recognition of his crimes. The journalists – who will testify in the next few days at the trial – explained that the newspaper did not publish that information because it could not compare it with the lawyer, Carlos Neira, who did not respond to the call, email and WhatsApp message that one of them sent him.
Hedo specified that the first information on the complaint from the Prosecutor’s Office against Ayuso’s partner arrived on the afternoon of March 6, when a journalist from ElDiario.es contacted her to find out if there was any complaint in the Prosecutor’s Office regarding a company called Maxwell Cremona which, according to the information provided by the journalist, belonged to a certain Alberto González, linked to the Community of Madrid. She, according to her story, told him to contact the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office.
According to Hedo, no one asked him about this matter again until March 12, when ElDiario.es published that the Public Prosecutor had reported Ayuso’s partner. The communications manager of the Attorney General’s Office, according to her version, then spoke with the press officer of the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office and, in response to the media’s request for information, sent the complaint filed against González Amador to the journalists who asked her.
Hedo underlined that calls from journalists multiplied on March 13 after 9.29pm, when El Mundo published the version provided by the head of cabinet of the president of Madrid and included the details of an email sent by the public prosecutor in the Ayuso case to his lawyer. Hedo underlined that, shortly afterwards, around 9.45pm, a journalist from La Sexta called him to explain that he had received information contrary to what he had published. The worldthat is, it was the lawyer who proposed an agreement, which is the information contained in the email that is at the center of the investigation and which, at that time, was not yet in the hands of García Ortiz (he received it at 9.59pm).
“The confusion was already enormous because journalists didn’t know if what was right was correct The world or not. AND The world It already included a specific email in quotes, with literal sentences and specific data. The emails were put up for sale,” Hedo said. From that point on, the press secretary exchanged phone calls and messages with García Ortiz about the case involving González Amador to put the information aside and write the statement, but explained that he only received verbal information and did not have access to the emails about the case.
The information note from the public prosecutor
Part of Hedo and Corral’s statement focuses on the press release issued by the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office on the morning of March 14, which included a chronology of the Prosecutor’s Office’s actions in the González Ayuso case. The preparation of that note was what, according to Hedo, led the attorney general to collect the emails exchanged between the lawyer and the prosecutor’s office.
The prosecutor stated in the first hearing of the trial that he did not agree with the note written by the Attorney General because it contained González Amador’s personal data, a point that was rejected by Hedo, who assured that the reluctance of the chief prosecutor and his chief of staff were never “formal objections” to the content. When questioned about this, the communications director of the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office admitted that his opposition to the note was due to the fact that it seemed “ridiculous” to publish that statement because all its contents had already been published in the media and the emails had been made public.
Before concluding his speech, García Ortiz’s communications manager left another relevant message on the leaks. The Attorney General’s defense asked her when she would know that the Supreme Court would indict her boss, to which she replied that there had been many rumors for several days before, on 16 October 2024, that the High Court opened the case; But the confirmation, Hedo underlined, was given to him by García Ortiz himself on October 12, when, leaving the reception at the Royal Palace, he called him to already know for sure that they would accuse him.
The prosecutor’s defense brought two other witnesses to try to dismantle two other elements on which the accusation is based. One was a prosecutor from the special anti-corruption unit, Diego Lucas, who inherited the González Amador tax fraud case. Lucas confirmed that his lawyers had re-proposed a compliance deal, which would mean taking on the crimes in exchange for avoiding prison, after the initial negotiation with the Prosecutor was revealed. In this way, the State Prosecutor’s Office, which defends García Ortiz, tried to dismantle the prosecutors’ thesis that the leak that Ayuso’s boyfriend had acknowledged the commission of the crimes had torpedoed his defense strategy. Lucas also recounted the maneuvers of González Amador’s lawyers to delay his statement in court after another investigation was opened against him for having purchased a worthless company for half a million euros from a businessman who had facilitated the collection of a commission of two million for the sale of masks in the midst of the pandemic.
The second witness was another prosecutor, Esmeralda Rosillo, head of the State Attorney General’s Support Unit, the department responsible for handling technology issues. In the case, the defense was trying to separate García Ortiz’s cell phone swapping from an attempt to destroy evidence. Rosilla underlined that this change of devices is common and detailed that the accused has already done it six times since he joined the Attorney General’s Office, in 2020, and three times since he took command, in 2023.
The former Secretary of State for Communications, Francesc Vallés, also appeared as the subject of the accusations in this case. The former senior government official denied having had access to the leaked email under investigation, which was sent on March 14, 2024 by another socialist employee from La Moncloa, Pilar Sánchez Acera, to the then leader of Madrid’s PSOE, Juan Lobato, to be used against Ayuso in a monitoring session of the Regional Assembly. Vallés denied having had any contact with the Public Prosecutor’s Office about the case and stressed that he did not even have García Ortiz’s telephone number.
