Álvaro García Ortiz will sit on the bench accused of filtering the mail in which Isabel Díaz Ayuso confessed author of two tax crimes. This Tuesday, the Judge of the Supreme Court Ángel Ortiz has issued the oral trial opening order.
The investigation began by the elaboration of a press release, an accusation now forgotten. He had several indicated for having participated in an alleged plot, now excluded. He focused on Moncloa's participation, now diluted. The cause, extended and trimmed, modified by some judges and others, raised to conspiracy of the powers of the State and now limited to the filtration of an email, has only maintained an immutable element during all this time: the alleged guilt of its principal and now unique accused, the State Attorney General.
The origin of the cause is the information published by the newspaper El Mundo on March 13, which was said that the Prosecutor's Office had offered a pact to Alberto González Amador, partner of the president of the Community of Madrid. The provincial prosecutor of Madrid, Pilar Rodríguez, who is no longer charged, said that this news was the result of “a biased interpretation” that resulted in a “false statement.” A “false information”, “a assembly,” he insisted, because the pact had been offered by González Amador's defense, and not vice versa.
Of plot in plot until staying nothing
To counteract the lie, disseminated by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez and collected by various media – some added that the pact had stopped by “orders from above” -, the State Attorney General decided to prepare a press release, for which he required the prosecutors involved in the cause of all documentation and post exchange. That night there is a crossing of messages, collected in a police report, and that Judge Ángel Hurtado described as a “frantic exchange of communications between different prosecutors.” There were headlines in which the prosecutor of economic crimes, Julián Salto, had to leave the football match he was attending to forward part of the documentation of the case.
The judge's cars on these messages resulted in journalistic pieces about a cross -messy night, pressures to “win the story” and prosecutors who collaborated with each other against the president of the Community of Madrid and his partner. All that story is reduced, in the words of the Supreme Appeals Chamber, to a simple “dation into account”, a mechanism collected in the Fiscal Statute by which a superior can request documentation from one case to other prosecutors.
That request was “a neutral act” that could only be associated with the crime investigated “when accompanied by other elements that evidence the will to concert with the authors of the revelation of secrets.” The three judges were sharp: “It is not the case.”
Prosecutor Pilar Rodríguez, in charge of collecting the documentation that night, is no longer charged after more than a year of investigation. The UCO came to accuse her of participating in the plot in exchange for a professional ascent, a deduction without evidence embodied in a report that has now been demonstrated as a falsehood. Several media included it as a fundamental piece of the plot and even assumed that he would sit on the bench and have to leave his position.
There is nothing anymore. The archive of the cause for Rodríguez occupied just a loose line, lost in the long texts about the processing of García Ortiz. Its prestige has been dragged on the ground without consequences. A collateral victim because the goal was always another.
Judge Hurtado not only argued that there was a plot between prosecutors from the messages of that night, but pointed to another collusion: Moncloa's hand was behind the dissemination of confession. But there were not even messages that support that theory.
The Supreme Judge wrote in his car on June 9 that García Ortiz followed “indications” arrived directly from the Moncloa Palace. The same judge who did not consider the Gürtel to concern the PP and Mariano Rajoy now placed the Government of Pedro Sánchez after the filtration of the mail. There are no argument, proof or minimal indication in the 51 pages order to support that statement.
The judges of the Appeals Chamber have had to recognize that “that factual statement has not been accredited with sufficiency”, and that it should not be included in the car. A delicate way of saying that a Judge of the Supreme Court accused the government without evidence of being behind the filtration. That phrase without livelihood served, again, to generate a flood of headlines on the alleged participation of Moncloa. And again, it is nothing.
However, Judge Hurtado, in his car on Tuesday, insists that the email was sent from the Prosecutor's Office to Moncloa. “From the State Attorney General, and before the mail of February 2, 2024, a copy of him to Pilar Sánchez Acera, director of Cabinet of the Secretary of State, director of the Cabinet of the President of the Government, had been disseminated by other means.” It is a statement for which the magistrate has no evidence, as the Appeals Chamber said. Nothing. But there it is, written in a Supreme Court.
A cause without evidence
Undress the two alleged plots that have fed cars and news in recent months, the cause has been reduced to the accusation against García Ortiz. However, in the investigation there is no single proof that the attorney general filtered the mail. The temporary coincidence between which they receive them and appears in the press has been disarmed by the statements of journalists, any of which have even provided physical evidence that they knew that there was a proposal for the pact before the Attorney General. They are not worth Ángel Hurtado and the two judges of the Appeals Chamber, who disregard those testimonies without major analysis.
They also appear in the cause technical reports that indicate that the mail of the Ayuso couple reached a generic email to which dozens of people had access. The only certainty is that who first spread some of those communications was the chief of Cabinet of Ayuso, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez. None of that has been taken into account in the case.
The main accusation against García Ortiz is that he erased his messages and emails. The absence of evidence turned into proof. A trap that placed the prosecutor at a devilish juncture: either let access the supreme (and therefore the accusations, and therefore to the whole world) to the professional and personal communications of the Chief of the Prosecutor's Office, or converted that protection of their professional and personal intimacy (and that of all the people who communicate with him) in a test on him. A dead end.
By the way, the judge ordered that the messages of the prosecutor be accessed and his emails for an alleged crime of revelation of secrets, which has not had judicial consequences for the affected. A few weeks ago we knew that, in the Montoro case, access to the former Minister of Finance was denied and all the listenings were annulled in a case that investigates multinational payments in exchange for legislative modifications to pay less taxes. The measure prevented investigating whether Montoro obtained and disseminated tax information from personal and political adversaries. Gives for a reflection on the principle of proportionality.
Without plots and without evidence, the case will go to trial. Although it does not record, after months of investigation, no evidence that García Ortiz leaked the email, the presumption of innocence has turned around in this case that forces the attorney general to demonstrate that he did not spread the mail. A complicated task in which you will not even have the opportunity to refute the evidence, but must replicate beliefs, temporary coincidences and suspicions.
Because the evidence, in this case, have been the least. The important thing has always been to knock the attorney general. Ángel Hurtado threatened with them asking the parties if he must suspend him from his position now that he is going to open oral trial, but has recounted. He keeps him in office but sends him to trial. By the way, with the obligation to leave 150,000 euros on bail.
The request to take him out of the APIF, a minority association, accusation in this case, and whose members are openly facing the State Attorney General. The APIF has already tried to cancel García Ortiz's appointment in a resource signed by the jurist Elisa de la Nuez and that included, for example, false data on the appointments made by the prosecutor. The Supreme disdained all his arguments. That day, an ex -fiscal who was a member of Apif and who is now a lawyer for this association tweeted: “As always, the penal will have to finish the work that the contentious always refuses to do.”
We are now at that right moment, in itself the criminal case initiated by the couple of Isabel Díaz Ayuso will be able to knock the prosecutor. In itself in the trial, the Attorney General will be condemned after an investigation that has not found testing of the filtration. In case the last bullet after an offensive of years will end up with Álvaro García Ortiz.
