The Supreme Court will have an unprecedented defendant on the bench of the Criminal Chamber: the State Attorney General. The oral trial opening signed by Ángel Hurtado turns Álvaro García Ortiz into the first attorney general to face a criminal accusation in Spain and will do so for the filtration of an email in which Isabel Díaz Ayuso's couple confessed to having defrauded 350,000 euros. A trial that arrives after a year of investigation in which neither witnesses nor the evidence have revealed who sent that confession to the press and after the judges have ignored that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, chief of cabinet of the president of the Community of Madrid, was the first to disseminate information in the case in the form of a bully to manipulate public opinion in favor of Alberto González Amador.
The oral trial opening has arrived four days after the opening of the judicial year in which García Ortiz claimed to believe in “Justice and the truth.” Hurtado, along 29 pages, accuses receipt of the paste Ortiz
They are the same conclusions that have already reached in November 2024, shortly after sending the Civil Guard to the offices of the Attorney General and the Provincial Prosecutor of Madrid, without luck in the first and with a prize in the second. The messages he could extract from Pilar Rodríguez's phone served to draw the internal frenzy of the Prosecutor's Office when the environment of Isabel Díaz Ayuso began to spread false versions about the case of her partner. A drawing that takes for granted without evidence that the Attorney General leaked that information to the press as soon as he obtained and that omits any allusion to the role played by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez and all the people who have testified, before a notary even, who had access to that information hours before.
The comparison between the previous prosecution and the final process of oral trial shows the scars caused by the Appeals Chamber, which endorsed the prosecution of the Attorney General but forced Hurtado to take the prosecutor Pilar Rodríguez out of the payroll of accused. What for the instructor was a fundamental piece of García Ortiz's plan to obtain the information in the case of Ayuso's couple became an accusation without evidence for the Supervisor Court.
It also disappears, with little noise, the unpublished mention of Hurtado that the Attorney General acted following “indications” of the Government's presidency, a phrase held at the time by the Popular Party to link Moncloa and denounce an “operation” against Ayuso. It remains, however, the statement that the confession arrived on the phone of Pilar Sánchez Acera, then advising in Moncloa, directly from the Attorney General's Office, already without specifying who could make that shipment because it does not appear in the case, any proves.
Nor are there allusions to the particular vote of one of the judges of the Supreme, very unusual in the causes against graduates in this court, who understands that García Ortiz would not even have to be charged because, as several witnesses have said, that confession knew her more people before she reached her hands.
There is no trace of many key elements of the case. Hurtado does not consider relevant that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Chief of Cabinet of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, knew from a day and a half before the filtration that González Amador had conversations with the Prosecutor's Office. Nor that the declared objective of the Attorney General was not harming the employer, but to deny the bulge that Rodriguez had disseminated with the help of half a dozen media. Nor to the contradiction that the Chamber witnessed when the businessman said he never authorized his lawyer to confess the tax fraud while the lawyer, to the surprise of all those present in the interrogation, said that of course he did have permission of his client.
The judge, following his criteria of eight months of proceedings, also does not consider several people, especially journalists, have recognized that they knew from those negotiations or even the specific content of the agreement hours or days before the Attorney General. Nor that, as the Prosecutor's Office has recognized, that confession was available to more people within the Public Ministry. Or that González Amador has hidden for the courts that his lawyer also sent the confession to the State Advocacy to seal an agreement and avoid jail.
At the moment the judge has chosen to impose a bond of 150,000 euros to García Ortiz, half of what the businessman requested as compensation and claiming that he is assured that he can pay a sentence, the fine and the costs. A bond of 120,000 euros imposed, for example, to former Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz accused of leading the Kitchen police operation to steal information from Luis Bárcenas. Far superior to the compensation set to victims of espionage of José Manuel Villarejo, at a rate of 5,000 euros per victim in cases such as Land, painter or iron.
A lost call
The Supreme has not yet set the trial against García Ortiz nor has the court yet formed officially. The accusations of the Criminal Chamber arrive, for now, until November and that is the month that they consider different sources for the beginning of the process. As for the Court, Fuentes del Supremo explain that it must be formed by the five magistrates who signed the admission to the proceedings of the case against the Attorney General: the then speaker Susana Polo and, with her, Manuel Marchena, Juan Ramón Berdugo, Carmen Lamela and Antonio del Moral. Waiting for two other members to join the court, excluding the instructor and the three members of the Appeals Chamber.
It will be these magistrates who prepare the calendar of the trial and also the list of witnesses that will appear. In addition to the foreseeable statement of González Amador himself, his lawyer, the three prosecutors who were charged and some journalists, remains to be seen if the payroll of witnesses reaches the surroundings of Isabel Díaz Ayuso. If Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, for example, will have to explain what information he spread among dozens of journalists, or if several informants can ratify that they had those data before the Attorney General, a key point of the defense of García Ortiz.
The deletion of messages from García Ortiz's telephone, which the Attorney General attributes to a periodic security measure, leaves a test and conclusion as great endorsements of Hurtado: that he has a loss call from a journalist that night and that, therefore, only he could filter the mail because only he had it. More people who had that information at their disposal have not been charged and at least a judge of the Supreme Court believes that this would have been enough to seal this case with a file, not with an oral trial opening.
