Alberto Gonzalez Amador’s lawyer on Thursday accused the state prosecutor of “launching an institutional story of confession and guilt” against the businessman, partner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who was tried for two tax crimes and one for forging documents. Lawyer Gabriel Rodríguez Ramos presented his final report in the trial by the Supreme Court against Álvaro García Ortiz on charges of divulging secrets, in which he confirmed that the head of the Public Ministry designed a “strategy” on the night of March 13, 2024 that included leaking the email in which González Amador confessed to the Public Prosecutor’s Office his crimes to Cadena Ser. In this way, according to the lawyer, García Ortiz could justify including those details in the press release that he prepared with his press boss because he did not reveal anything that had not previously been published in the media. According to Rodriguez Ramos, this statement “destroyed” the presumption of innocence and Gonzalez Amador’s right to defense.
The Special Prosecution report was the first that the court heard in the final session of the trial, as some of the six popular charges gave him part of their time (the court estimated it to be between 30 and 45 minutes) so that he could elaborate for about an hour and a half. Rodríguez Ramos defended that once all the evidence presented at the oral hearing had been carried out, García Ortiz’s guilt was strengthened because it was revealed that when he learned that Ayuso’s chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, was spreading a “hoax” that the Public Prosecutor’s Office had proposed an agreement to González Amador and then withdrawn it by orders from above, in reference to the Prosecutor, he had designed an operation to leak the confession of Ayuso’s accomplice.
But in his report, which was read almost in its entirety although presented in a certain theatrical manner at times, he left out some basic information, such as that the chief of staff of the President of the Community of Madrid was the first to leak an email of the conversations that took place between the Public Prosecutor’s Office and González Amador’s lawyers. That’s why the lawyer puts the beginning of his story at 9:29 p.m. On March 13 when the world He broke the news of the distorted version that Rodriguez was publishing, prompting García Ortiz and Madrid’s public prosecutor, Almudena Lastra, to agree to write a press release to refute the news.
It was this decision that prompted the Public Prosecutor to collect emails exchanged between the lawyer and the Public Ministry, which, according to García Ortiz in his testimony before the court, he became aware of through information the worldwhich included quotes from a previously leaked email by Ayuso’s chief of staff. The head of the published ministry said that compiling the emails was necessary to be able to understand everything that happened and explain it in the memo, without including the chronology of those messages. Emails The summary of its content in the statement would have been “lame.”
The memorandum focused a large part of the Special Prosecution’s intervention because, in its opinion, it constitutes a “unity of action” with the email leak, both of which constitute the crime of disclosing secrets that it attributes to Garcia Ortiz. Counting the emails, the prosecutor’s office statement included details in one of them that the lawyer admitted to committing two tax crimes, a secret that was supposedly revealed. The Admissions Chamber of the Supreme Court considered that the statement was not criminal because all its content had already been published in the media, but González Amador’s lawyer maintains that it was García Ortiz himself who leaked the email to the press in order to have the pretext of including that information in the memorandum. “His strategy considered that what the journalists had previously revealed allowed him to publish the memo, the content of the emails, and the institutional story of the confession and guilt,” said Rodriguez Ramos, for whom it was “not necessary” to cite the confession of Ayuso’s accomplice to the crime to “neutralize the trick” of his chief of staff.
The lawyer downplayed the credibility of dozens of journalists who appeared as witnesses at the trial and asserted that they knew the details of the agreement that Gonzalez Amador negotiated before his lawyer’s email reached the prosecutor at 9:59 p.m. On March 13. According to Rodríguez Ramos, all their statements should be taken “with caution” because the obligation to answer all questions and tell the truth works in an “erotic” way with journalists as they can take advantage of their right not to reveal the source. The lawyer also said the informants “have an economic, professional or commercial interest in being of interest to the District Attorney’s Office as a source.”
The accusation above all undermines the credibility of the Cadena SER editor who first published the story about the email at the heart of the investigation. This journalist claimed before the Supreme Court that he had access to that email on the afternoon of March 13 from a source who was not García Ortiz, but that he was prevented from publishing it and was only given permission to do so after the world He published Miguel Angel Rodriguez’s distorted version. According to Rodriguez-Ramos, this testimony lacks any probative capacity “because the informant has no proof and is ‘untruthful’ in some details of his story, such as when he said he tried to contact Gonzalez Amador’s tax lawyer at noon.” He sent him a WhatsApp message at 11:10 p.m. For the first time communicating with him. And don’t try to send it first if you have news to warm your hands? ” asked the lawyer.
However, for the prosecution, the fact that the confession of the crime by Ayuso’s accomplice was already in the media when the email was leaked does not eliminate the crime of disclosing secrets. The lawyer argues that the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court that determines what was previously known cannot be considered confidential, and therefore the duty of custody on the part of public authorities disappears, and does not operate in this case. “The means used by politicians to disclose information are not suitable for the Attorney General’s Office, which has an enhanced duty. His presence in the media does not eliminate the duty of confidentiality. Perhaps that was a mistake in the Attorney General’s design.”
According to Rodriguez Ramos, the publication of the memo and the email leak “destroyed” Ayuso’s partner’s right to privacy, the presumption of innocence and the right to defence. “What defense will be exercised in the trial of Alberto Gonzalez Amador?” asked the lawyer, who ascertained during the trial that the prosecutor’s office’s “institutional story of confession and guilt” “consistent with the political story of a confessed criminal” spread by the government regarding Ayuso’s accomplice. The lawyer confirmed: “They are identical stories. It is not that the existence of identical hadiths was reported to the media, but rather that he was a recognized criminal. There was a conviction even before the start of criminal proceedings.”
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