Judge Ángel Hurtado ordered that the Civil Guard intervene in more than seven months of private conversations of the State Attorney General to clarify facts that are limited to the night of March 13, when a media outlet published an email from Alberto González Amador’s lawyer. denied a hoax spread by the Community of Madrid.
A measure reserved for serious crimes, and not for an alleged revelation of secrets, was approved by the magistrate against the head of one of the highest institutions of the State, without restricting its limits, which will allow Hurtado to collect secret information. the investigations, the contacts between Álvaro García Ortiz and his subordinates and any other conversations that the Attorney General had over such a long period of time.
The order authorizing intervention on García Ortiz’s phone, tablet and computers refers to his “social networks”, referring to messaging services and email accounts. And it establishes that all messages received or sent from these accounts have been under investigation since March 8.
The date alludes to the fact that the day before, on the 7th, the provincial prosecutor of Madrid, Pilar Rodríguez, had informed her subordinate, Julián Salto, that the person against whom an investigation had been opened a few days before, after two years of investigation of the Treasury which resulted in a complaint to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, is the partner of the President of the Community of Madrid.
As in other cases involving a politically exposed person, the prosecutor should open accounts, informing his superior of the steps in the procedure. The Treasury has been investigating Alberto González Amador for two years, considered another fraudulent businessman. When the tax authority concluded that its actions had gathered evidence of a crime, it forwarded its report to the prosecutor’s office.
The lawsuit against the Attorney General is the consequence of the filing of several complaints, including one by Alberto González Amador. However, even Ayuso’s partner’s defense did not go that far in its attempts to gather information from the attorney general’s phone number and emails. The defense of Ayuso’s partner only demanded the messages from his personal email within 13 days – between March 5 and 18 – and not seven months, as the judge agreed. The commissionaire’s lawyers requested this diligence after the prosecutor in the case, Julián Salto, told the Superior Court that the night the hoax was published on alleged orders from above in the pursuit to paralyze a agreement that would avoid trial, he sent communications with Ayuso’s partner’s defense to García Ortiz’s personal email address.
The complaint from the Madrid president’s partner was filed for the publication of a press release on the morning of March 14, precisely to deny various published information reproducing this deception. After a reasoned statement from the Superior Court of Madrid, which referred to the denial sent to the media, the Chamber of the Supreme Court presided over by Manuel Marchena agreed to investigate an alleged crime of revealing secrets, but not because of the press release , which alluded to already known facts, chose to investigate the leak of the email in which González Amador admitted to two tax crimes and which was first published by Cadena Ser.
This message demonstrated that another email previously published by El Mundo constructed the deception according to which it was the prosecution which had offered a deal to González Amador’s lawyer, and not the other way around. This information supports the thesis of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Ayuso’s chief of staff, according to which the prosecutor’s initial offer of agreement, somewhat false, had been withdrawn “by order from above”, a thesis which was later was published by different media. .
The decision of the conservative judge Ángel Hurtado to obtain information on seven months of activity of the attorney general includes his communications with the heads of specialized prosecutions, such as Anti-Corruption, Anti-Drugs or the National Court, which investigate cases many more serious than an alleged revelation of secrets. Clean Hands and other ultra organizations are involved in the case and, if the judge does not put an end to it, they will take back the state-sensitive information that was on the attorney general’s cell phone when the secrecy of the summary will be lifted. .
Information on relevant cases
Yesterday, in the background, there was a second search carried out by the Civil Guard on the orders of Hurtado. The attorney general of the province, Pilar Rodríguez, also suffered the intervention of her messages and emails. Álvaro García Ortiz heads the institution that enforces the law in Spain, but the state attorney general’s office does not investigate cases. This is not the case with the provincial prosecutor’s office.
In the cloned computer of Pilar Rodríguez, there are cases that are currently being followed in the autonomous community, some as relevant as the one that keeps indictment the wife of the president of the government, Begoña Gómez, or the one that attributes, for the At the moment, two tax offenses and one of falsification of documents recognized by Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner.
The entry and search of the State Attorney General’s Office in the operation of the Supreme Court against Álvaro García Ortiz took place in eleven tedious hours during which the team of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard cloned the complete contents of a mobile phone, two computers – a laptop and a desktop – and a tablet. No one opened a drawer or touched a piece of paper. “The treatment reserved for civil guards has always been very correct,” say sources close to police action.
Aware of the seriousness of the situation, the team of agents was led by Lieutenant Colonel led by the head of the UCO Economic and Anti-Corruption Investigation Department. The lieutenant colonel investigated corruption cases as important as Púnica or Lezo when he was commander. To date, the investigations into the Koldo affair or the reports requested by Judge Juan Carlos Peinado on Begoña Gómez, the wife of the President of the Government, depend on him.
The Attorney General was notified, and identification and cloning of the devices began. Only he and his secretary could be present in his office, to facilitate access. The process of cloning the devices took eleven hours and ended around midnight.
The civil guards continued their work in the presence of the lawyer of the Administration of Justice of the Supreme Court, who was replaced at some point by a colleague, a legal aid official and the attorney general of the Supreme Court. The attorney general waited until the cloning was completed and only left his office at certain times. After 11:00 p.m., the agents left the headquarters of the general prosecutor’s office.
