This Thursday, just a few minutes before 2pm, the Supreme Court announced that it had criminally convicted, for the first time in the history of the current democratic phase, the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz. It does so just seven days after (with a weekend in between) the presiding judge, Andrés Martínez Arrieta, declared a six-day trial “seen for sentencing.” The arguments of the five magistrates who will sign that resolution are not yet known, given that the Court of Appeal limited itself to making public the meaning of its sentence and announced that it will soon notify the sentence, “awaiting drafting”. The Government has already announced that it will activate the mechanisms to appoint a successor.
The High Court now opens a period of uncertainty. The Supreme Court has not announced when it will issue its ruling, nor the private votes announced by Ana Ferrer and Susana Polo, the only two justices included in the progressive bloc. This implies that, during all this time, García Ortiz is condemned in the face of public debate (even if the resolution does not take effect until it is notified), but he cannot try to refute the argument that the High Court supports to punish him for the crime of revealing confidential data.
The absence of a resolution raises questions until its contents are known: what are the elements and arguments used by the court to base its decision? Do you consider Álvaro García Ortiz the direct author of the leak? Did the press release reveal secrets? How are the exculpatory statements of different journalists evaluated?
The trial went through all the key points that surrounded the case: from the search in the general prosecutor’s office (which the defense and the prosecutor’s office defined as “disproportionate”) to the hoax spread by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff, which detonated the chain of events that ended with the dissemination of a press release to deny the lie of the popular position and the distorted information of The worldin which it was claimed that the Prosecutor’s Office had offered a deal to Alberto González Amador, partner of the Madrid president, when in reality it had been the opposite (it was his lawyer, Carlos Neira, who had promoted a deal to avoid prison in exchange for the recognition of two tax crimes, through a later leaked email).
The revelation. The preview of the sentence offers very few details, but contains the provision of the penal code with which the court punishes García Ortiz with a fine of 7,200 euros, “the special disqualification from the office of attorney general of the State for a period of two years” and the payment of costs (including those of the private proceeding brought by González Amador). The Supreme Court applies article 417.1, created to condemn “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”. It remains to be seen how the five judges will interpret this point and how they will apply it to the specific case: how the revelation occurred and through what elements.
The accusations were very clear with their main thesis: the attorney general is behind the leak of González Amador’s defense email. But, during the trial, no direct evidence of their involvement was put on the table, so they tried to support that theory with peripheral or circumstantial evidence.
The press release. A good part of the trial focused on the leak of the email sent by González Amador’s lawyer (where he proposed that agreement), which the press published on the night of March 13, 2024. But the shadow of the press release released by the Attorney General on the morning of the following day – when the contents of the e-mail was already known: he accompanied all the sessions. In the resolution issued at the opening of the proceedings against the general, the Supreme Court admitted that such “information contained in the aforementioned information note (…) had been brought to light by different means, with the exception of the dates”, and that “apparently” there was “no information improperly revealed”. However, the investigating judge Ángel Hurtado recovered that statement during the investigation and, in prosecuting García Ortiz, insisted on presenting that document as a “unit of act” with the email leak.
The accusations also focused on the press release in its conclusions. They argued, for example, that the attorney general had spent the e-mail to journalists on the night of March 13th in order to then be able to reproduce the content in the article of the 14th (because in this way he did not publish anything that had not already been released by the media). Although Ayuso’s boyfriend’s lawyer went further and even stated that this statement by the prosecutor constituted a crime in itself since it revealed an “institutional reality that had not been conveyed to the media.”
Sources consulted indicate that the court considered both the dissemination of the email and the press release to be the crime of revealing secrets.
The thesis of the Guardia Civil. During the trial, one of the strengths of the prosecution was the main conclusion of the members of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Guardia Civil, who demonstrated their belief that García Ortiz was behind the leak. After analyzing the exchange of communications between various members of the Prosecutor’s Office and the press reports, the agents highlighted that everything that passed through the heads of the public prosecutor’s office ended up being leaked in a short time (such as the complaint against González Amador, the suspected email or the press release itself). And according to the UCO, García Ortiz then had “total control of the action” at “all levels” (due to his position). A civil guard summed it up like this: “Show a modus operandi to gather information and presumably leak it.” One popular prosecution called this idea “filtering dynamics.” However, the defense not only denied that the defendant passed the email to journalists, but insisted that his sole goal was to gather data to offer “truthful” information through a press release.
Journalists. Another thing to know is how the Supreme Court deals with the testimony of half a dozen journalists who claimed to have access to the contents of the leaked email before the attorney general. José Precedo, from elDiario, He told the court he had a paper copy e-mail from a week earlier. And Miguel Ángel Campos, from Cadena SER and the first journalist to reproduce quotes from the document, declared that he had been able to see, read and copy it six hours earlier. Both denied, during testimony (with the obligation to tell the truth), that their source was García Ortiz.
The damage to González Amador. During his statement, Ayuso’s boyfriend presented himself as a victim, who had seen how his right to defense had been undermined when the email was leaked. “From that day I became the self-confessed criminal of the Kingdom of Spain. Mr. (Álvaro) García Ortiz had killed me publicly,” he summed up before the magistrates. The Supreme Court estimated the damage at 10,000 euros, which is the compensation that García Ortiz will have to pay to the partner of the Madrid president and which is another of the figures put forward on Thursday.
The Illustrious College of Lawyers of Madrid (ICAM), which appeared to be a popular accusation, argued that the actions of the management of the Prosecutor’s Office represented an attack against “the essence of the right of defense and diluted the principle of effective judicial protection”. Its dean, Eugenio Ribón, said on Thursday: “The resolution issued by the Supreme Court, with all procedural guarantees, confirms the legal relevance of the reported facts, in which the content of a communication between a lawyer and a public prosecutor protected by professional secrecy was compromised.”
