If the state attorney general’s trial were a football game, it would take place at halftime. Three of the six scheduled hearings took place and 20 of the 40 witnesses cited testified. With what result did we reach the halfway point? In a trial there is no evaluation framework and each party is confident that the first days of the hearing were favorable to them. The legal sources consulted believe that there have been positive aspects for the prosecution and others for the defense, and warn that it is too early to make a prediction. What seems clear, after half the hearing, is that there is no reliable evidence that it was Álvaro García Ortiz who leaked the February 2, 2024 email in which the lawyer of the entrepreneur Alberto González Amador admitted to the commission of two tax crimes. And there are several testimonies that suggest its content e-mail It was already known to several journalists before the Attorney General received it (at 9.59pm on March 13, 2024).
The jurisprudence of the Supreme Court on the crime of revealing secrets indicates that “when a secret is revealed, and even more so if the recipient of what has been revealed is an information professional, the secret or confidential information has ceased to be secret” and, therefore, the obligation of public officials to keep it safe has ceased to exist. Most of the statements from the first week of the trial focused on this question and the sources consulted indicate that this question – whether in this case the conditions for the existence of the crime of revealing secrets exist – will also be the first thing the court will have to debate.
García Ortiz’s defense claims that neither the attorney general leaked the email nor, even if he had, would there be a crime: and his thesis was supported by the testimony of four of the six journalists who testified on Wednesday. Three said they knew that González Amador’s lawyer had sent an email to the Treasury acknowledging his fraud before the document reached García Ortiz. And another said that, although he did not know of the existence of that writing before it was leaked, he knew that the businessman was willing to admit the fraud to solve his problem with the Treasury. This publisher, The worldhe further stated that, several hours before the February 2 email was leaked, he had accessed another, in this case sent on March 12, 2024 by the prosecutor to Ayuso’s partner’s lawyer.
This last statement is linked to the testimonies of González Amador himself; of his lawyer, Carlos Neira, and of the head of cabinet of the president of the Community of Madrid, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez. The three underlined that Ayuso’s partner authorized Rodríguez to release that March 12 email to the media, a circumstance which, according to the State Attorney’s Office (which defends García Ortiz) and the Prosecutor’s Office, implies that it was the businessman himself who violated the confidentiality of the conversations between his lawyer and the public prosecutor.
The three remaining hearings in the trial (next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) will feature key testimony, including the statement as investigated by the attorney general, scheduled for the penultimate hearing. Before that, 20 more witnesses will appear, including the Cadena SER journalist who provided the first information about the February 2 email, which is the leak being investigated by the Supreme Court. The UCO agents who made the reports included in the investigation are also cited, including the one that concluded that García Ortiz had deleted all WhatsApp messages from March 13 and 14 (when the leak occurred) on the day the Supreme Court indicted him (October 16, 2024), a circumstance that the court considered a further indication to put him on the bench. The defense refutes this deduction of the agents and presented an expert report to the Supreme Court which concludes that it is not possible to know on which day those messages were deleted.
So far these are the main testimonies heard:
Division of the Prosecutor’s Office. In the first three hearings, the testimonies of six prosecutors were heard and only one of them, the chief prosecutor of Madrid, Almudena Lastra, declared himself in favor of the prosecution’s theory. Lastra assured that he suspected the Attorney General as the author of the leak from the beginning, although he admitted that this is a hypothesis based on the fact that the e-mail It was released shortly after it reached the Attorney General (who received it at the same time as you). The chief provincial prosecutor, Pilar Rodríguez, and the deputy prosecutor of the Technical Secretariat of the Attorney General’s Office, Diego Villafañe, accused in this case but not tried, supported García Ortiz’s action. Both also questioned Lastra’s decision not to publicly denounce the investigation opened against the partner of the Madrid president, which became known only when it was published in the press on March 12, 2024, a week after the Madrid prosecutor’s office registered the complaint. These statements coincide with the defense’s thesis that in the case of González Amador there had been an “information closure” order by the superior prosecutor of Madrid.
González Amador presents himself as a victim. Ayuso’s partner, whose prosecution for tax fraud and document falsification was confirmed on Friday by the Provincial Court of Madrid, appeared before the Supreme Court as a victim of the Attorney General, who he accuses of having leaked the email in which his lawyer admitted to having committed two crimes against the Treasury. Its diffusion e-mailhe claims, “publicly killed” him because it led many politicians and the media to speak of him as a “self-confessed fraudster.” “They have destroyed my life. Either I leave Spain or I commit suicide,” he declared in court. However, the businessman admitted that he had authorized his lawyer to negotiate an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office to resolve his problem with justice “quickly and quietly” and that his lawyer explained to him that this implied “the recognition of the crime”.
The falsehoods of MÁR. Ayuso’s chief of staff, known by his pseudonym SEAhe left a statement with several falsehoods and many contradictions. Rodríguez insisted on his thesis that Ayuso and his partner were, and continue to be, victims of some sort of state operation: “González Amador is not a criminal. He is not a swindler. He is a Spaniard who wanted to reach an agreement with the Treasury and the Treasury did not allow him”, he downplayed it. However, the defense managed to prove that Rodríguez had lied, stating that the prosecutor had offered a deal to González Amador and that he had withdrawn it due to “orders from above”. “I am not a notary who needs any certification,” apologized Rodríguez, who also admitted to having provided several journalists with an email that the prosecutor had sent to her boyfriend’s lawyer.
The truth versus the hoax. Six journalists testified Wednesday. Three who published on the night of March 13, 2024 the version according to which the negotiation between the Prosecutor’s Office and Alberto González Amador had been initiated by the Public Prosecutor. And three hours later published the exact order of events: that the attempted agreement had started from the defense of Ayuso’s boyfriend. “Time has proven us right,” said Alfonso Pérez Medina, a court specialist The sixth. His words, together with the testimonies of the editors of elDiario.es (José Precedo and Marcos Pinheiro), fully influenced the object of the proceedings (who revealed the secret?) and became three valid defense assets. Precedo assured that he had a copy of the e-mail filtered since March 6 (i.e. a week before it arrived at García Ortiz); Pinheiro added that he “knew” that mail had been handled by them since that day; and Pérez Medina claimed to have had access to its contents even before the Attorney General received it. The journalist of The worldEsteban Urreiztieta, while ensuring that he did not know of the existence of that email until it was published by other media, stressed that he knew that González Amador and the Prosecutor’s Office were negotiating an agreement that implied the entrepreneur’s admission of crimes.
With these appearances, the State Attorney’s Office and the Public Prosecutor’s Office intend to demonstrate not only that it is impossible that it was the State Attorney General who leaked the email to these media, but that there were other potential leakers. And that the alleged secret (the admission of two crimes by the lawyer of Ayuso’s partner) was not secret when García Ortiz received the document. The goal: to introduce reasonable doubt in court to obtain acquittal. Indeed, the defense hopes to add new testimony next week to support this line of argument: more journalists have been called. Among these stands out Miguel Ángel Campos (Cadena SER), who was the first to reproduce the email from the night of March 13, 2024 in quotes.
The ‘Via Moncloa’ is blocked. The accusations also saw how another of the theories they tried to introduce into the case was missing: that there is a line that connects the Public Prosecutor’s Office with La Moncloa and that, therefore, García Ortiz was able to leak the news e-mail to the Government to make it available to the press. To try to prove it, they brought two witnesses before the judges: Juan Lobato, former general secretary of the PSOE of Madrid; and Pilar Sánchez Acera, current secretary of the Madrid Socialists organization and worker in La Moncloa in March 2024. On the morning of March 14, Sánchez Acera sent Lobato a screenshot of what the leaked email looked like (by that point, several media outlets had already reproduced its contents, but not the image). However, Sánchez Acera assured that he had obtained it from a journalist (although he stated that he did not remember which one), not from the public prosecutor. And he insisted that the document received is different from the leaked one: the text is the same, but the paragraphs and typography are different.
