The Supreme Court has made public the list of seven magistrates who will judge and sentence the State Attorney General for the filtration of an email of Isabel Díaz Ayuso. A majority court conservative and composed sensitivity, above all, by the five judges that a year ago they opened to open the cause against Álvaro García Ortiz. The same ones that, at that time, had to deal with an antecedent of the case and rejected impute to the first vice president and minister of the Treasury, María Jesús Montero, accused by several complaints of revealing confidential data of the tax file of Alberto González Amador.
The case that will sit on the bench to the Attorney General in the second half of November was born in another court, the Superior of Madrid (TSJM), in May 2024. The judges agreed to investigate prosecutor Julián and his superior, Pilar Rodríguez, after several complaints and complaints of the González Amador himself and the Bar Association of Madrid. But by then more associations and groups linked to the extreme right had tried, on their own, to open the criminal route around the information that exposed the fiscal fraud of the regional president's couple.
Two of them arrived at the Supreme Court Registry in March last year, when the focus was put elsewhere. The Liberum Association, known for its anti -vaccine activism in the courts, and the Forum Libertad and Alternative Foundation, linked to old high vox positions and the PP, complained against the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, for revelation of secrets and infidelity in the custody of documents. The reason: hours after Eldiario.es revealed the case of González Amador, he had addressed journalists in the corridors of the Senate to ask Ayuso explanations for living in a paid floor “with fraud to the public hacienda.”
The two complaints in defense of González Amador accused Montero of having revealed confidential details of the entrepreneur's tax file, and even having taken her position as Minister of Finance to get them and expose them. The Supreme Court, with the signing of five of the judges that will now sentence García Ortiz for a similar accusation in origin, rejected the complaints twice defending that most of that information had already been published by Eldiario.es hours before and that in addition, by then, the complaint of the Prosecutor's Office and its tax file “had already transcended third parties and had been made public.”
This case, although settled in two cars in the Chamber and not in sentences, is considered a relevant antecedent for the trial that will take place, predictably, at the end of November in the Supreme. Those cars were signed one day after those same five magistrates agreed to open a cause against the Attorney General. And they are the ones that will be part of the court that will judge Álvaro García Ortiz in a few weeks.
The media “already had the complaint”
The texts that ratified the inadmissibility of the complaints had the signatures of Susana Polo, Manuel Marchena, Antonio del Moral, Juan Ramón Berdugo and the speaker Carmen Lamela, five of the seven magistrates who will now judge the attorney general along with Ana Ferrer and the new president of the Chamber, Andrés Martínez Arrieta. His resolutions approached two debates that have been repeated, over months, in the open case against the State Attorney General for the filtration of the confession of tax fraud of the Ayuso couple.
Montero's statements in the Senate, after the control session to the government, took place after five in the afternoon of March 12, 2024, hours after Eldiario.es uniquely revealed that the Prosecutor's Office had denounced the employer for tax fraud after a long investigation of the Tax Agency. According to the complaints, Montero pointed to data until then unknown: that he had made fortune during the pandemic as a sanitary commission in operations of sale of masks.
In this case, the five magistrates of the Chamber stated that the news about the complaint filed against González Amador “had already jumped to the media since the early hours of the morning”, with the publication of this newspaper. And that these first news did not have “express reference” that González Amador's money could be related to the sale of masks “does not imply that this circumstance was no longer known by the media, which already had at their disposal the complaint filed by the Prosecutor's Office of Madrid.”
Those first news, added the Supreme Court, also cited the report of the Tax Agency that supported the case. “All this shows that, when the complaint made the demonstrations, the denunciation of the Prosecutor's Office and its content, among which was the report of the Tax Agency, had already transcended third parties and had been made public, so that no data or information could reveal that they should remain secrets.” In a subsequent car to ratify its rejection of the imputation of Montero, the same court added: “The mere fact of being Minister of Finance cannot make presume that the complaint will seize such data.”
The confession already circulated through the writings
The debate about the attorney general and the filtration of the mail with the confession of fiscal fraud of Alberto González Amador revolves around two axes: if there are evidence that demonstrates that the attorney general spread that email between the press on the night of March 13, 2024 and, in addition, if by when he received it that information was already held by more people, especially means of communication. In the Public Ministry they understand that these records, dictated by most of the court that will judge García Ortiz, feel a relevant precedent.
The attorney general, represented here by the State Advocacy, has always defended that he never sent that email to the press and that his work that night was to collect all the information of the case to deny the bulos that spread several means at the request of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, head of the Cabinet of Ayuso. The investigation has not managed to reveal any contact by García Ortiz that night with any journalist or that he gave any order to filter the document.
He also alleges from the beginning that half a dozen journalists already knew those negotiations hours or even days before him, late on the night of March 13, obtained all the emails. These are informators of eldiario.es, the country or the sixth who have declared that they knew this information for their own sources and before García Ortiz knew it.
Until now, Judge Ángel Hurtado has assumed that it was the attorney general who sent that information to the media that published the content of the mail. In his defense brief, García Ortiz replicates that it is logical that everything coincided over time: the investigation of the journalists who sought to publish the true succession of facts, and in parallel the accounts with which García Ortiz sought to collect the information and issue a statement the next day.
That statement was the beginning of the cause that now feels on the bench to García Ortiz. At first, the open proceedings in the Superior Court of Madrid that later traveled to the Supreme Court focused on that text and its elaboration, a line of investigation that decided to follow Judge Hurtado. The five magistrates who admitted the case against García Ortiz and who will now direct the trial also said that this statement was not criminal because by then, the morning of March 14, 2024, all the details of Alberto González Amador's negotiations and confessions were known throughout the world.