After five hearings, the state’s attorney general, who watched the trial mostly silently with his lawyers, appeared in court this afternoon to defend his innocence. Álvaro García Ortiz denied that he leaked an email in which the lawyer of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner, Alberto González Amador, who was indicted on tax evasion charges, admitted to the prosecutor’s office two crimes against the Treasury Department. he did it SER chainthe first media to hint at it emailGarcía Ortiz assured other journalists as well. As he has done throughout the investigation, he also admitted responsibility in another document focused on the investigation, a press release issued to deny the falsehoods spread by Ayuso’s inner circle about González Amador’s negotiations with the public prosecutor’s office. However, he denied that the statement contained personal information about Ayuso’s partner that should have been omitted. “This is a systematic response of the Spanish Public Prosecutor’s Office to news that calls into question the work of the Economic Crimes Prosecutor’s Office (…),” García Ortiz said, defending his actions on the night the investigation came into focus. “My tenacity is to protect the Public Prosecutor’s Office.”
Garcia Ortiz’s statement marks the final stage of the state attorney general’s trial. The Civil Service Commissioner took advantage of the right, already granted to all defendants by the Supreme Court, to make a final statement after all witnesses have appeared and court-approved cross-examinations have taken place. During his five trials, Garcia-Ortiz wore an attorney general’s robe and watched the proceedings from a stand next to the state attorney’s office where he was conducting his defense. But this afternoon, he abandoned that position, took off his toga, sat in the center of the room, and testified that an investigation was underway.
Visibly nervous at first, but relaxing somewhat as the statement progressed, the public ministry secretary refused to respond to the general accusations or to the personal accusations made by Mr. Ayuso’s partners. He dedicated the first few minutes of his hour-and-a-half appearance to explaining why he made this decision. He asserted that González Amador had omitted relevant data in the complaint that gave rise to the case. For example, an email reviewed and sent by the attorney “had already been forwarded on the same day, February 2, to a third party belonging to an agency that was not a party to the proceedings at the time,” referring to the State Attorney’s Office. Or “the first person to reveal” Email” One of the prosecutors was González Amador himself, who forwarded an email that prosecutors sent to lawyers in the case to Ayuso’s chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, who gave him permission to disseminate it to the media. “Had that been known from the beginning, the course of the proceedings could have been different,” the attorney general said, adding that the private prosecutor had acted “with disloyalty not only to him, but also to the court and the investigating judge.”
Absent the intervention of the whistleblower, the Foreign Ministry’s statement is limited to questions from the prosecutor’s office and its defense team. The Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court raised only two issues:
-Did you send the February 2nd email to anyone other than the public prosecutor’s office?
-no
-Was it confirmed in the statement to the instructor on January 29, 2025?
-Yeah
Once this procedure was completed, State Attorney José Ignacio Osio wrote to García Ortiz, giving him the opportunity to explain in detail what happened between March 7, 2024 (when García Ortiz learned from his press manager that the Madrid Public Prosecutor’s Office had reported a businessman who turned out to be Ayuso’s partner on suspicion of tax evasion) and March 14, when the Public Prosecutor’s Office issued a press release containing a chronology of events. It was created from emails exchanged between González Amador’s lawyer and the prosecutor who accused him, Julián Salto.
During this time, Mr. Garcia Ortiz’s statement was specifically suspended on the afternoon of March 13th. This came after Madrid’s top prosecutor, Almudena Lastra, called García Ortiz and warned that Ayuso’s chief of staff was spreading the word among journalists that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had offered an agreement to González Amador’s lawyers, but then withdrew it “on orders from above,” possibly referring to the attorney general’s office. García-Ortiz emphasized the unusual nature of the situation, pointing out, “This is the first time I’ve received a phone call from Lastra since I became state attorney general.”
At 9:59 p.m., an hour after that conversation, world The newspaper published a news article that included Mr. Lastra’s warning to Mr. García-Ortiz and a quote from an email the prosecutor in the case sent to Mr. Gonzalez-Amador’s lawyer on March 12, in which Mr. García-Ortiz indicated he was open to reaching an agreement. The head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asserted that it was then that he learned of the exchange between the prosecutor’s office and the lawyer. email and ordered them to be assembled to recreate what happened. “I want to know what happened, a case was filed against the courier, and we decided to defend the actions of the prosecutor, which are completely impeccable,” he stressed.
García Ortiz recalled that it was a “dynamic” night in terms of information, and that while collecting emails, he received information that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez continued to spread “insidiousness and slander” in messages to journalists and on his own Twitter account, which convinced him that the prosecutor’s office needed to clarify what happened in a press release.
In a statement, Garcia-Ortiz justified his decision to delete all messages and emails from his devices. He asserted that if his communications were leaked, it could “put many people in this country at risk.” “I am very aware of this, which is why I am conducting systematic deletions. I will not allow information contained in chats that may contain professional information or organizational relationships to remain on my WhatsApp for more than a month,” he stressed.
His last words were borrowed from someone who attended the afternoon session on the sidelines and approached him before the session began. “The truth is not filtered, the truth is protected.”
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