The General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) unanimously approved Teresa Peramato on Wednesday as the next state attorney general to replace García Ortiz, who resigned on Monday after being sentenced to a two-year ban from office for the crime of revealing secrets linked to the businessman Alberto González Amador, associate of Isabel Díaz Ayuso and tried for fraud against the Treasury.
The Council’s report on the proposed appointment of the Attorney General is a mandatory, but non-binding, procedure in which the CGPJ verifies that the candidate meets the formal requirements to occupy that position: being a Spanish jurist of recognized prestige with more than 15 years of effective practice of his profession. After approval by the Council, the government can now bring its proposal to the Council, where the future public prosecutor will appear before the Justice Commission. The intention of the Executive is to accelerate the takeover of Peramato so that there is no transitional period after the official dismissal of Álvaro García Ortiz, which will occur when his resignation is published in Official State Gazette (BOE)
Traditionally, the Council’s reports on the appointment of the Attorney General were limited to reporting whether the proposed person met the legal requirements, but the conservative bloc of the previous CGPJ broke that formula in 2023, when the Council had already had its mandate extended by five years due to the lack of agreement between PSOE and PP on the renewal of the body, so there was some interest in knowing how Peramato would be received by the new Council.
In Peramato’s case, all prosecutors’ associations agreed to recognize his career, a very unusual consensus in a career deeply divided after the trial that led to García Ortiz’s disqualification. The future attorney general has 35 years of career – 20 more than what the law requires to be able to hold that position – and has been prosecutor of the Chamber (the highest category) since 2021, when she was appointed head of the Prosecutor’s Office against gender violence. He was currently head of the criminal section of the Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office.
