Juan Lobato, until a few hours ago leader of the Madrid socialists, declared Friday before the Supreme Court that he was obliged to tell the truth about how the emails from Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner reached him. The former deputy must testify before judge Ángel Hurtado and hand over the messages that he recorded a few weeks ago in a notary office in the capital: in which, supposedly, a Moncloa advisor offered him the confession of tax fraud by Alberto González Amador so that it could be used as a weapon against the Madrid president. A new derivative in the trial against the Attorney General for revealing secrets which depends on the time of these messages.
The origin of Lobato’s statement dates back to March 14. When the former Secretary General of the PSOE of Madrid stood up from his seat in the Regional Assembly and, shortly after 10:40 a.m., he held up a document that elicited loud applause from everyone of the opposition. The email that Alberto González Amador’s lawyer had sent a month earlier to the prosecutor who was investigating him to offer to admit his tax fraud of 350,000 euros and to accept a symbolic prison sentence in exchange for don’t go to jail.
The paper that Lobato waved from his seat was then a torpedo against the waterline of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s strategy to defend her partner. Far from it being a “hunt” by the Treasury, the Prosecutor’s Office and the Government against her through her boyfriend, the businessman himself had recognized his crimes for weeks and was looking for a pact to avoid the prison. But eight and a half months later, and with the tax fraud case virtually paralyzed, that document and its release those days have become an investigation that keeps the state attorney general indicted.
Juan Lobato will have to explain to Judge Hurtado how and when this email reached him. That morning, while being applauded in the Madrid Assembly, he suggested that he had obtained this email from the “media” who, an hour earlier, had published its contents. But the ABC newspaper revealed that this was not the only time they had learned of this information. That same morning, at a time to be determined, the Moncloa councilor and his PSOE colleague from Madrid, Pilar Sánchez Acera, contacted him to schedule the distribution of these emails.
The former socialist leader will not only have to explain whether they sent him these emails, what time he received them and whether by then, a media outlet had already published them. Even if the document he presented to the Madrid Assembly had been extracted, as he had suggested at the time, from a newspaper that he had not cited at the time, or s This was the same document allegedly sent to him by Sánchez Acera, then a senior official at Moncloa.
Lobato’s first explanations, after learning of the information, came last Monday, when he was still secretary general of the PSOE in Madrid. “I don’t see what the problem is with proving the lawful origin of this communication,” he said. He said he was convinced that his visit to the notary only served to prove that neither he, nor the PSOE nor Moncloa had access to these emails in front of the media. A day later, and after the internal unrest in the party, he raised the possibility that his interlocutor, then chief of staff of Óscar López, had lied to him.
Juan Lobato went to the notary in Madrid to record these messages on very important dates for the legal file investigated by the Supreme Court. Almost eight months after having this conversation with Pilar Sánchez Acera, but a few days after Judge Hurtado sent the Civil Guard to the Attorney General’s Office, precisely following the trail of these emails. A few days earlier, elDiario.es had revealed that the PSOE was preparing its replacement to entrust Óscar López as head of the party in Madrid.
The origin of the case against the Attorney General
This branch of the investigation that Lobato inaugurated this Friday parallels the one that Judge Hurtado has been advancing at a good pace for weeks with two defendants: the state attorney general and the provincial prosecutor of Madrid. The magistrate is investigating whether, on the night of March 13, a few hours before Lobato – according to his version – received these emails, it was Álvaro García Ortiz who put these emails into circulation, in the middle of a battle for deny a deception by El Mundo. on the action of the prosecution in the trial against the partner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
The chronology of the case begins on March 12, when elDiario.es exclusively revealed that the Public Prosecutor’s Office had denounced Alberto González Amador seven days earlier for fraud of more than 350,000 euros. The slogan of Ayuso and Génova was to designate an attack by the State against “an individual”. On the night of March 13, the digital edition of El Mundo published information on the case which told one of its most significant episodes in reverse: the prosecution had proposed a pact to the man of business.
At that time, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez himself, right-hand man of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and other media falsely added that this agreement had been withdrawn by order “from above” to prolong the process of the stations of the cross of the boyfriend of Ayuso and, by extension, of the president of the Community of Madrid.
The reality was the opposite, as usually happens in these cases, although much earlier than usual: it was the lawyer of Alberto González Amador who, a month earlier, had written to the public prosecutor’s office to recognize his crimes and agree a sentence that would allow him to avoid prison. The public prosecutor, on the orders of the Attorney General, requested these emails from the prosecutor in charge of the case and the next day, at 10:20 a.m. on March 14, published a press release without revealing the content but explaining that the events did not had not taken place. arrived.
Initially, the case, when it was handled before the Superior Court of Madrid, was directed against this statement by the Prosecutor’s Office. But it was the Supreme Court that put a twist on the matter and, after rejecting that the statement revealed confidential information, embarked on an investigation into whether the attorney general had literally released the emails. Because at the time the prosecution published its press release, several media had already reported on the emails, either by citing their content or by showing the entire document.
Various media relayed its contents without broadcasting the document on the night of March 13, and the first publications containing the document arrived the next day at nine in the morning. An hour and a half before Lobato triumphantly brandished the email in front of the Madrid Assembly. The report of the notary to whom he went secretly at the beginning of November will reveal whether these emails exchanged between Alberto González’s lawyer and the prosecutor Julián Salto were also in the hands of Moncloa or if, in reality, they were limited to political use. to the information already published.
