Alberto González Amador’s lawyer accused the State Attorney General on Thursday of “launching an institutional story of confession and guilt” against the entrepreneur, partner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso and tried for two tax crimes and one for falsification of documents. Lawyer Gabriel Rodríguez-Ramos presented his final report in the ongoing trial at the Supreme Court against Álvaro García Ortiz for a crime of revealing secrets, in which he argued that the head of the public prosecutor’s office developed a “strategy” on the night of March 13, 2024 consisting in leaking to Cadena SER the email in which González Amador admitted his crimes to the Prosecutor’s Office. In this way, according to the lawyer, he could have justified the inclusion of this detail in the press release prepared by García Ortiz and his press chief and which did not reveal anything that had not already been published before by the media. With this statement, Rodríguez-Ramos noted, González Amador’s presumption of innocence and right to defense were “destroyed.”
The prosecutor’s report is the first that the court hears in the last hearing of the trial, where some of the six popular prosecutors gave him part of their time (estimated by the court at between 30 and 45 minutes) so that he could elaborate for about an hour and a half. Rodríguez-Ramos argued that, once all the evidence required by the hearing had been carried out, García Ortiz’s guilt was strengthened because it emerged that, when he learned that Ayuso’s chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, spread the “hoax” according to which the Prosecutor’s Office had proposed a deal to González Amador and then withdrew it by order from above, presumably referring to the attorney general.
But in his report, almost entirely read although at times delivered with a certain theatricality, he ignored some key information, such as that the head of cabinet of the president of the Community of Madrid was the first to leak an email of the conversations that took place between the Prosecutor’s Office and González Amador’s lawyer. The lawyer places the beginning of his story at 9.29pm. on March 13, when The world published a news story with the distorted version that Rodríguez was spreading, which prompted García Ortiz and Madrid’s chief prosecutor, Almudena Lastra, to agree to write a press release to deny that news.
This decision was what led the Attorney General to collect the emails exchanged between the lawyer and the prosecutor, of which, according to García Ortiz in his deposition before the court, he was made aware of the information coming from The worldwhich incorporated quotes from the previously leaked email from Ayuso’s chief of staff. The head of the Ministry published claiming that the compilation of the emails was necessary in order to understand everything that happened and explain it in the note and that without the inclusion of the chronology of those e-mail and the summary of its contents in the declaration would have been “lame”.
The note focused much of the public prosecution’s intervention because, in their opinion, it forms a “unity of act” with the leak of the email and both constitute the crime of revealing secrets which they attribute to García Ortiz. In accounting for the emails, the Prosecutor’s Office statement included the clarification that, in one of them, the lawyer had admitted to having committed two tax crimes, which is the secret allegedly revealed. The Admissions Chamber of the Supreme Court found that the statement did not constitute a crime because all of its contents had already been published by the media, but González Amador’s lawyer claims that it was García Ortiz himself who leaked the email to the press to have the excuse to include that information in the note. “His strategy was that the journalists’ previous revelations authorized him to publish the note and the contents of the emails, the institutional story of confession and guilt,” said Rodríguez Ramos, for whom it was “not necessary” to include the recognition of the crime of Ayuso’s partner to “neutralize the hoax” of his chief of staff.
The lawyer reduced the credibility of the dozen journalists who appeared as witnesses in the trial and assured that they knew the details of the agreement that González Amador negotiated before his lawyer’s email reached the attorney general at 9.59pm. of March 13th. According to Rodríguez-Ramos, the statements of all of them must be taken with “caution” because the obligation to answer all questions and tell the truth operates in an “anomalous” way with journalists since they can make use of their right not to reveal the source. The lawyer further argued that the informants “have an economic, professional or commercial interest in looking after the Prosecutor’s Office as a source.”
Above all, the accusation undermines the credibility of the editor of Cadena SER who first broke the news about the email at the center of the investigation. This journalist claimed in the Supreme Court that he had accessed that email at midday on March 13 from a source who was not García Ortiz, but that he was forbidden to publish it and was given permission to do so only once The world had spread Miguel Ángel Rodríguez’s distorted version. According to Rodríguez-Ramos, this testimony has no probative capacity.”
However, for the prosecution, the fact that Ayuso’s partner’s acknowledgment of the crime was already in the media when the email was leaked does not eliminate the crime of revealing secrets in this case. The lawyer therefore argues that the jurisprudence of the Court of Cassation which establishes what is already known cannot be considered secret and, therefore, the duty of custody on the part of the public authorities, which does not apply in the present case, ceases. “The means that politicians use for disclosure are not valid for the Prosecutor’s Office, which has a strengthened duty. And the fact that it is in the media does not eliminate the duty of secrecy. It was probably a design error by the Attorney General.”
According to Rodríguez-Ramos, the release of the note and the leak of the email “destroyed” Ayuso’s partner’s right to privacy, his presumption of innocence and the right to defense. “What defense will be exercised in the trial against Alberto González Amador?” asked the lawyer, for whom it was confirmed in the trial that “the institutional history of confession and guilt” of the Prosecutor’s Office “aligns with the political history of a self-confessed criminal” that the Government has released regarding Ayuso’s partner. “They are identical stories”, assures the lawyer, “it’s not that the existence of compliance conversations was broadcast to the media, it’s that it is broadcast that he is a self-confessed criminal. There is a conviction before the criminal proceedings were even opened”.
