The lawyer for Alberto González Amador on Thursday accused the state attorney general of “starting a systematic story of confession and guilt” against Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner, a businessman charged with two tax crimes and one count of falsifying documents. Lawyer Gabriel Rodríguez Ramos submitted the final report of the ongoing trial in the Supreme Court against Álvaro García Ortiz on charges of leaking secrets, in which he claimed that on the night of March 13, 2024, the Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs devised a “strategy” that included leaking to SER Cadena the email in which González Amador admitted his guilt to the public prosecutor’s office. In this way, according to the lawyer, García Ortiz was able to justify including the details in a press release prepared with the press director. Because it doesn’t reveal anything that hasn’t already been announced in the media. Rodríguez-Ramos said the statement “destroyed” the presumption of innocence and González Amador’s right to defense.
The private prosecutor’s report was the first the court heard in the last trial, in which he was given a portion of his time (30 to 45 minutes, the court estimated) to elaborate on some of the six general charges for about an hour and a half. Rodriguez-Ramos argued in his defense that Garcia-Ortiz’s guilt would be further strengthened if all the evidence provided at the oral hearing were implemented. Because it was revealed that Ayuso’s chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, had learned that he had been spreading a “false rumor” that the prosecutor’s office had offered González Amador an agreement and then withdrew it by order from above. He supposedly planned the operation to divulge the confessions of Ayuso’s partners to the Attorney General.
However, although his report has been read in almost its entirety, and at times delivered with a certain theatrics, it ignores some important information, such as that it was the chief of staff of the president of the Community of Madrid who first leaked the emails recording the conversations between the public prosecutor’s office and González Amador’s lawyer. To do this, the lawyer sets the start of his talk to 9:29 p.m. March 13th, world García Ortiz and Madrid’s top prosecutor, Almudena Lastra, agreed to write a press release refuting the news after it published a distorted news article that Rodríguez allegedly spread.
The decision required the Attorney General to collect emails exchanged between lawyers and the Foreign Office. Garcia-Ortiz said in a statement in court that Garcia-Ortiz learned of this through a tip. worldwhich incorporates quotes from emails previously leaked by Ayuso’s chief of staff. The head of the department argued that the editing of the emails was necessary in order to be able to understand everything that happened and explain it in notes, without including a chronology of them. email And to sum up the content of that statement, it would be “boring.”
The memo focuses in large part on the private prosecutor’s intervention because, in its opinion, it forms a “unit of conduct” with the email leak, both of which constitute the crime of revealing secrets attributed to Garcia-Ortiz. Explaining the emails, the prosecutor’s office statement included details that in one of the emails, a lawyer admitted to committing two tax crimes, which is said to have revealed the secret. Although the Supreme Court’s Trial Chamber deemed the statement noncriminal because all of its contents had already been published in the media, González Amador’s lawyers argue that it was García Ortiz himself who leaked the email to the press in order to create an alibi for including that information in the memo. “He believed that previous revelations by journalists gave him the authority to publish the contents of the memos and emails, which were a systematic story of confession and guilt,” Rodríguez Ramos said, adding that there was “no need” to cite Ayuso’s partner’s knowledge of the crime to “neutralize the fabrication” of the chief of staff.
The lawyer undermined the credibility of more than a dozen journalists who appeared as witnesses in the trial, asserting that they knew the details of the agreement before González Amador’s email reached the attorney general at 9:59 p.m. Rodríguez-Ramos said that all their statements should be taken with “cautiousness” because the obligation to answer all questions and tell the truth operates “unusually” on journalists, as they have access to the right not to reveal their sources. The lawyer also argued that the informants “have a financial, professional, or business interest in serving the prosecutor’s office as a source of information.”
Above all, this accusation undermines the credibility of SER Cadena’s editor, who was at the center of the investigation and broke the first report on the email. The journalist argued in Supreme Court that although he had access to the email at noon on March 13 from a source who was not Garcia-Ortiz, he was prohibited from publishing the email and that Garcia-Ortiz did not give him permission to publish it. world They were promoting a distorted version of Miguel Ángel Rodriguez. Rodríguez-Ramos said the testimony lacked admissibility because the informant had no evidence and some details of his story were “not true,” including that he said he tried to contact González Amador’s tax attorney at noon. “The informant sent him a WhatsApp at 11:10 p.m.” to communicate with him for the first time. And if you have news that warms your heart, why not send it to us first? asked the lawyer.
However, for the prosecution, the fact that Ayuso’s partner’s knowledge of the crime had already been reported in the media at the time the emails were leaked does not preclude the crime of leaking secrets. In response, lawyers argue that Supreme Court precedent establishing what was previously known is not considered secret, and therefore the duty of custody on the part of public authorities is extinguished and does not apply in this case. “The methods used by politicians to release information are not effective for prosecutors’ offices, which have enhanced obligations. And the fact that it was published in the media does not eliminate the obligation to maintain confidentiality. Perhaps it was a design error on the part of the attorney general.”
According to Rodríguez-Ramos, the dissemination of the memo and the leak of the emails “destroyed” Ayuso’s partner’s right to privacy, his presumption of innocence and his right to defense. “What kind of defense will be offered at Alberto González Amador’s trial?” asked the lawyer, whose trial confirmed that the prosecutor’s office’s “institutional narrative of confession and guilt” was “consistent with the political narrative of a confessed criminal” that the government had propagated about Ayuso’s partners. “These are the same stories. The media was not told that there was a sympathetic conversation, but that he was a confessed criminal. There was a conviction before any criminal proceedings were started,” the lawyer asserted.
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