“I want it to be clear that as a result of the attorney general's leak my life has been destroyed. What can happen is: either I leave Spain or I commit suicide.” These were the words with which businessman Alberto González Amador, prosecuted for two tax crimes and accused of business corruption, ended his testimony as a witness in the Supreme Court. To his left, with a serious face, Álvaro García Ortiz was listening to him, whom he managed to put on the bench for disseminating a note with the details of his judicial procedure. “I do not recommend either of the two things,” the president of the court told him.
That last allegation was the culmination of almost two hours of interrogation in which the commissioner tried to present himself as a victim, a “normal citizen” persecuted by “the entire fiscal body” only for his personal connection with the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. A strategy of victimization that had been inaugurated by the Madrid leader's chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, who had previously appeared and had made light of the hoaxes spread by the Madrid Government in defense of the alleged fraudster. The dissemination of this distorted information motivated the reaction of the Prosecutor's Office that ended up taking García Ortiz to trial.
The advisor, with a cocky tone at times, assured that the 350,000 tax fraud for which the businessman is facing the bench “would not have been important” if he had not been a partner of the regional president. “There is no one in Spain who doubts it (…). For five years, the entire State apparatus has been plotting everything to attack a political rival,” said Rodríguez, who also falsely said that the Treasury “has not allowed González Amador to reach an agreement.”
Two prosecutors have refuted the thesis of Ayuso's right hand man at trial. Julián Salto, the prosecutor who reported him, said this Monday that he learned who González Amador was days after filing the complaint against him in court. Diego Lucas, the current prosecutor in the case, also alluded this Tuesday to the maneuvers of González Amador's defense to “delay” the investigation when the judge opened a separate piece to investigate his relationship with Quirón. According to the commissioner, this last prosecutor, whom he placed “on the side of the accusations”, has played all the time to “lengthen the process.”
“García Ortiz had publicly killed me”
González Amador did great business in the pandemic: he earned two million euros in just four months of 2020 for his intermediation in a sale of masks in the midst of the health crisis. And, when he had to pay taxes, he devised a system of false invoices and front companies to deceive the Treasury, as elDiario.es published on March 12, 2024. These are the facts for which he will sit in the dock accused of five crimes if the Provincial Court does not prevent it at the last moment and that the businessman defined this Tuesday in the Supreme Court as “a normal and ordinary process (…)” that he wanted to close “quickly and without noise” so as not to harm his partner and which ended up putting him in the eye of the hurricane.
“Between the (press) note from the Prosecutor's Office and the publication of the email (in which his lawyer acknowledged the crime) I became the confessed criminal of the kingdom of Spain. I was dead. García Ortiz had publicly killed me. Nobody is aware of the year that has occurred to me,” he stated in the first passages of the interrogation to questions from his lawyer.
González Amador also elaborated on the “devastation” that the publication of the details of his judicial procedure had meant for him. According to his story, he has lost suppliers, contracts and financing. And he even alluded to the case of a worker from one of his companies who had been denied the rental of an apartment after verifying that he was her employer. “Nobody has an idea of the social and economic punishment,” said the businessman, who also denounced that he is already “condemned” without having undergone any trial.
The businessman alluded to the lawsuit he faced against the Madrid City Council over the works on the house he shares with Isabel Díaz Ayuso. And he gave as an example of the economic “destruction” that, despite winning the lawsuit, the council has not paid in costs even half of what it has spent on the lawyer in the case. He did not mention the money invested in the dozens of honor lawsuits that he filed against politicians and journalists and that, for now, he has lost after the Supreme Court has established that, much to his regret, he is a public figure subject to criticism.
Miguel Ángel Rodríguez celebrates his hoaxes
Miguel Ángel Rodríguez had already testified in the Supreme Court. He did so in January, when before Judge Ángel Hurtado and behind closed doors he timidly acknowledged and defended the hoaxes he had spread about the case. This Tuesday, before seven magistrates and dozens of media outlets, Ayuso's chief of staff had no problem boasting that the origin of the trial was his lies: “I give the news that the Prosecutor's Office proposes an agreement and from there madness breaks out.”
Rodríguez served as the Madrid president's right-hand man and took advantage of his testimony to flood the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court with the political slogans of his boss regarding the case of his partner: “He is not a criminal, he is not a fraudster: he is a Spaniard who wanted to reach an agreement with the Treasury and the Treasury has not allowed him to reach that agreement.”
The theory that both Ayuso and the PP defend since elDiario.es revealed the case is that González Amador is the victim of a plot by the powers of the State, which includes the Treasury, the Prosecutor's Office and occasionally the judges. This Tuesday in the Supreme Court he was explicit: “The entire State apparatus for five years has been plotting everything to attack a political rival.”
Rodríguez's first hoax came a few minutes after starting his statement: that the Tax Agency never allowed him to agree. The reality is that he tried to pay his debts after the deadline and the Treasury informed him that, at that point, there was a possible tax fraud that had to reach the judges. Asked about the hoax that he spread among dozens of journalists on the night of March 13, 2024, he acknowledged that everything was a “deduction” that he maintains to this day: “I think about it and with more reason every day. I keep saying it: everything is shady and ugly. An injustice is being committed against a Spaniard.”
That night, Rodríguez presented as news to dozens of journalists something that had not happened: that the Prosecutor's Office had offered a silent agreement to González Amador, but that the negotiations had been frustrated by order of the leadership of the Public Ministry. Before the Criminal Court he defended the hoax: “If the agreement has not yet been reached, someone has stopped it. And it can only be stopped at the top,” he deduced before the astonished look of the lieutenant prosecutor of the Supreme Court.
He even went so far as to defend the tweets in which he developed the hoax or in which he announced that the attorney general was “going ahead.” “It was a forecast and not an unwise one. Look where we are,” he said, as if the existence of the trial made it a reality that the attorney general ordered not to negotiate with his boss's partner. All while he weathered his contradictions with his January statement and justified his attacks and threats to elDiario.es by claiming that it is a “leftist” newspaper and disqualifying an exclusive that, to this day, has not been denied in any of its aspects.
González Amador and Rodríguez sought to agree on the same thing: that neither of them leaked to the press the email with which they confessed to tax fraud and that they remain convinced that everything they spread those days is true. In the substantive debate, the judges will have to decide whether the authorization that the businessman gave to his partner's chief of staff serves to consider that he was the first to break the confidentiality of his emails. And if Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, public defender of the commission agent, lied with impunity or conditioned the actions of the Prosecutor's Office.