The trial of Álvaro Garcia Ortiz, the first against a state prosecutor, was held for sentencing on Thursday. The oral hearing ended with the intervention of the State Attorney’s Office, which requested García Ortiz’s acquittal. “The facts lack an evidentiary basis (…) An institutional activity of providing accounts and issuing an official statement to reveal information that casts doubt on the institution, the public prosecutors and the state prosecutor has been criminalized,” said lawyer José Ignacio Osio. The law firm accused businessman Alberto Gonzalez Amador, partner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso and the courts for tax fraud and document forgery, of acting in “bad faith” to delete relevant data in the complaint that led García Ortiz to the bench. Osio also confirmed that it was Gonzalez Amador himself who violated the confidentiality of his lawyer’s negotiations with the Public Prosecutor’s Office by sending an email from the prosecutor in the case to the chief of staff of the President of Madrid and by providing details of those negotiations with a journalist from the world.
The intervention of the State Attorney put an end to a historic trial during which the head of the Public Ministry assumed the position of the accused for six days. Garcia Ortiz could have used his right to say a few final words before the president of the court ended the session, but he waived that. With this decision, the final argument in the courtroom will be the argument of the state’s lawyer, who confirmed that the Public Prosecutor is innocent and tried to refute all the evidence that was revealed hours ago, one after the other regarding the accusations. He added: “There is absolutely no evidence because there cannot be any evidence.” Hours ago, the Public Prosecution also demanded the acquittal of the Attorney General for the same reason.
One of the pillars of the defense is denying the existence of the conditions for the crime of disclosing secrets attributed to Garcia Ortiz. The lawyer pointed out that Supreme Court case law stipulates that something does not become secret when it becomes known to the media, and six journalists who testified as witnesses confirmed that they knew the alleged secret – that Gonzalez Amador confessed to his crimes in an attempt to reach an agreement that would reduce his sentence – before the prosecutor received the email on which the investigation is focusing. Osio stressed the “plausibility” of these testimonies, some of which are supported by WhatsApp messages that were incorporated into the case.
The defense rejects the accusations’ argument that these witnesses do not have credibility because they are protected by professional secrecy by not revealing the source of their information. The lawyer cited on this point the dissenting opinion issued by Supreme Court Justice Andres Palomo against the prosecution of García Ortiz: “To deny the effectiveness of that testimony by a judicial body because it can identify the source, it does not do so is to demand that it abdicate the right to a constitutional text that is difficult to understand.”
However, the law firm defends that, even without the testimony of these journalists, the confession of the crimes committed by González Amador was no longer a secret when García Ortiz received the email, because it was the businessman himself and his entourage who violated that supposed secrecy. The lawyer stated that this happened when Ayuso’s partner sent Miguel Ángel Rodríguez the email that his lawyer had just sent him in which the prosecutor in the case was open to accepting the matching agreement; But also when Gonzalez Amador himself spoke on the morning of March 13 to journalist from the world That a few hours later, at 9:29 p.m., he signed the news that included the false version that it was the Public Ministry that had offered an agreement to the businessman.
This information included details of the agreement that Ayuso’s partner was negotiating and quotes from the email that the prosecutor sent to his lawyer. “When the owner of the secret gets involved with third parties, the secret is lost,” Osio warned. “We have to ask ourselves whether speaking to a journalist and passing (the email) to your partner’s chief of staff is typical of the conservatorship he is now seeking. What he cannot do is disclose these terms of the agreement and, immediately afterward, say that these conversations are still confidential.”
The defense also contends that even if the Supreme Court finds that Ayuso’s partner’s secret was revealed, there is no evidence that the prosecutor leaked the email. The lawyers tried to refute the evidence on which the Supreme Court relied in sentencing the head of the Public Ministry and these people, according to the accusations. They were added during the trial. Among them, the most important: that the email was broadcast in the media only an hour and a half after Garcia Ortiz received it.
For the legal profession, this is an “inference of little value” because the Public Prosecutor of Madrid, Almudena Lastra, also had access to this email at the same time (she is five minutes ahead of the head of the Public Ministry); District President Pilar Rodriguez; and Dean of Economic Crimes Verna Rodriguez. Furthermore, the attorney said that that email became relevant when the El Mundo news was published at 9:29 p.m. At that time, 16 other people (prosecutors and District Attorney’s Office officials) had access to this message “from their homes” in the public email account to which Gonzalez Amador’s attorney sent the email. The defense questioned why, of all these cases, the Supreme Court only investigated Garcia Ortiz and Rodriguez (whom it recently pardoned). He added: “It is a loophole in the investigation, and there is no explanation for it.”
Osio also does not see consistency in other facts used in the accusations against the Public Prosecutor, such as the deletion of his messages and emails, because the Civil Guard itself admitted that it could not confirm the deletion of WhatsApp messages on the day of his trial, as stated in a report; Or the fact that a Madrid prosecutor confirmed that hours after the email was revealed, she told García Ortiz “I leaked the email” and he replied “It doesn’t matter now.” The defense warned that this was “conjecture” and questioned its credibility by recalling that Lastra did not mention this fact when he first testified about what happened those days in March 2024 and that he changed his story in the two statements before the Supreme Court.
The defense believes that these words of the chief prosecutor are due to her “bad relationship” with the Public Prosecutor. But not only that: the law firm also believes that Lastra imposed a media “embargo” on the fraud complaint filed by Ayuso’s partner, which is why it did not even issue a press release on March 7 when it learned of the complaint, unlike what it did in other cases of less media interest; They made “excuses” for not publishing the statement drafted by the Attorney General’s Office when the facts were already available to the public.
Ausio also dismissed the special prosecution’s hypothesis that the leak of emails by Garcia Ortiz was a “preparatory act” for the publication of the memo to launch a “corporate story of guilt” against Ausio’s partner. “It is not sustainable,” the lawyers said.
The prosecution is demanding acquittal
The defense’s intervention was preceded by the intervention of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which also demanded the prosecutor’s acquittal because the testimonies heard at trial prove that García Ortiz did not leak the email, and that in any case the content of the message Email It was no longer a secret when he received it. “Even in the hypothesis that the State Prosecutor had leaked the email while he was in possession of it, at that time it remained unpunished because the news was already known by many media outlets. He is accredited in this case,” said Angeles Sanchez Conde, which, contrary to what the charges stated on Thursday, gives credibility to the journalists who testified as witnesses.
The Public Prosecutor stressed that the WhatsApp messages of the information professionals who contributed to the case confirm that the details of the agreement between Gonzalez Amador and the Public Prosecutor’s Office were circulated hours before the Public Prosecutor requested that email; And that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez lied several times during his testimony to the coach, such as when he said that elDiario.es had not contacted him before publishing the tax fraud complaint against Ayuso’s partner or when he confirmed that he had not published the distorted version that it was the Public Ministry that was seeking to reach an agreement with the defense until El Mundo newspaper published it at 9:29 p.m. On March 13. Messages in the case between Rodriguez and a journalist from El País show that the former had already been spreading his false narrative since around 7:00 p.m.
The Prosecutor of the Supreme Court also focused on the fact that the statements of Alberto González Amador, partner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and the director of the office of the President of Madrid, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, show “a very flexible relationship between them, with a constant exchange of letters” and noted that both of them shared the strategy of combating the fraud complaint filed by González Amador “by casting a shadow of doubt on those who intervened in the process,” from treasury officials to prosecutors.
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