“The object of the process is what it is, the Appeals Chamber has already withdrawn that part.” Magistrate Andrés Martínez Arrieta, president of the court that judges the attorney general, has dedicated most of his interventions during the hearing to asking lawyers and witnesses not to digress and to focus on the object of the trial. But in that specific intervention, the judge referred to an already closed portion of the case: how the confession of tax fraud by Isabel Díaz Ayuso's partner reached a Moncloa advisor and, from there, to the then general secretary of the PSOE in Madrid, Juan Lobato.
The revelation fell like a bomb on Ferraz and like May rain on the accusations in the case. Lobato, a direct political rival of Ayuso in the regional Assembly, had gone to a notary to record messages that opened the door for Judge Ángel Hurtado to implicate Moncloa and the socialists in the leak. On the morning of March 14, 2024, who was then an advisor to the Presidency and senior party official in the capital, Pilar Sánchez Acera, had sent Lobato the document of disagreement. He had done so after its contents had been leaked to the media, but before any newspaper had published the email in its entirety.
The testimonies in the trial of Lobato, Sánchez Acera and the former Secretary of State for Communication Francesc Vallès do not reflect the earthquake that a year ago was caused by the notarial act that the then leader of the Madrid PSOE certified to “cover his back”, in his own words, after the Supreme Court opened an investigation. The appearance of internal messages from the party and the Government on one of the hottest mornings of 2024 politics raised the question of how far Hurtado would go after sending the UCO to the attorney general's office.
Sánchez Acera herself, then advisor to the Presidency of the Government with Óscar López and now at the right hand of the minister in the PSOE of Madrid, confirmed in her testimony what the notarial record already explains: she sent Lobato a document with the confession of Ayuso's partner at 8:29 minutes on the morning of March 14. And she, in turn, was sent it by a journalist whose identity she does not remember. “Eight months passed, I had forgotten quite a bit about it.”
The passage without pain or glory of these testimonies through the trial does not reflect the political intensity of that moment either. elDiario.es had revealed the case of Ayuso's partner and that day the Madrid president appeared for the first time in the Madrid Assembly. Meanwhile, the reality — that her partner wanted to recognize her fraud and make an agreement — clashed with the political discourse — that she was the victim of a plot — that she, her chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, and the PP disseminated with and without microphones.
Vallès, then Secretary of State for Communication, slipped it in the trial, but said it much more forcefully in investigation: “It is evident that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, and this is politics, what he intended was to condition the control session in Madrid the following day.” That is, converting, through hoaxes and manipulations, a confession into a new persecution by the Treasury and the Prosecutor's Office. Lobato's messages put lyrics to the song that, obviously, the PSOE and the Government were singing those days: “In Moncloa and Ferraz they want maximum noise and commotion.”
“It wasn't new”
González Amador's lawyer tried it during the investigation and has tried again during the trial: that the witnesses linked to the PSOE and Moncloa, since they do not explain where the paper came from, say at least that the case of Ayuso's partner was a communication priority for the Government. But Judge Hurtado closed the criminal proceedings in March and the Appeals Chamber withdrew the judge's darts and speculations about Moncloa and the leak.
The accusations, with Ayuso's partner at the head, requested Hurtado to take all kinds of procedures to thoroughly investigate Sánchez Acera's phone number. The judge's response came in March: he was not going to charge the advisor nor was he going to continue investigating in that way. Because by the time she returned the document to Lobato for political use, the leak that he attributes to the Prosecutor's Office had been completed the night before.
What the advisor did was “continue to circulate information that, if it had been confidential, had already ceased to be so having apparently been leaked by the Prosecutor's Office. What she was transmitting was not new, she is not making any secret public,” Hurtado said then. Furthermore, she was not the public official in charge of ensuring that confidentiality.
Hurtado then cut off a criminal investigation into the role of Moncloa and the PSOE in the leak. He even cited the doctrine of his colleagues in the Chamber in the case of a civil guard convicted of passing information to a group of Galician drug traffickers: “Revelation consists of making public what should not be public.” A 2020 ruling signed by three of the judges who are currently judging the attorney general and that Hurtado interpreted in a sense that the Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney's Office use to request the acquittal of García Ortiz: if the email was already known – several journalists have declared this – there was no secret to reveal.
The “indications” of Moncloa
The investigating judge, in that order from last March, blocked the way for the investigation to advance along that path, something that contradicted González Amador's intention and the accusations of taking the case to Moncloa. But Hurtado left a loophole in the door that he himself had closed: he started the indictment, key in the process, with an unpublished accusation: the Prosecutor's Office had leaked the confession following “indications” from the Moncloa.
That statement by Hurtado caused surprise in the Supreme Court and happiness on Génova Street, where the national headquarters of the Popular Party is located. The party of Alberto Núñez Feijóo asked that Pedro Sánchez appear in Congress to explain these “indications” and the party leader asked for the resignation of the President of the Government: “It is time for the attorney general and the person who gave him the instructions to leave.”
Neither the investigation nor the trial have revealed those supposed “indications” that several accusations endorsed in the qualification documents. And that they were excluded from the case, as Judge Martínez Arrieta recalled, by the Appeals Chamber that qualified Hurtado's indictment. “Certainly that factual statement has not been sufficiently accredited, so its inclusion in the factual account was dispensable,” the judges said.
The testimonies of Lobato, Sánchez Acera and Vallès finished sealing the judicial end of this branch of the case that served to include La Moncloa in the case and show as suspicious that in those days of high political tension in Madrid the case of Ayuso's partner was an informative hot spot. The interventions of González Amador's lawyer, who even asked whether or not the Secretary of State for Communication reported to the President of the Government, show interest in a dead end investigation that allows the accusations to keep the ghost of La Moncloa alive in the case.