The Supreme Court has several requests on the table for the trial against the Attorney General to go further and investigate the role played by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, right-hand man of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, in the publication of Alberto González Amador’s emails. Álvaro García Ortiz’s requests for the judge to analyze whether the commissioner’s entourage was the first to disseminate this information ran into opposition from the PP and overlaps with the new strategy of the Madrid president’s partner: requesting a compensation that almost exceeds the amount of tax fraud he admitted to.
The earthquake which led to the entry of the elite unit of the Civil Guard to seize the devices of the Directorate of the Prosecutor’s Office is being resolved by order and appeal. Judge Ángel Hurtado, after ordering investigators to seize seven months of messages and emails from all cell phones, tablets and computers of the Attorney General and Provincial Prosecutor of Madrid, asked the Civil Guard, once all the material seized, analyze only the one that has to do with the cause and linked for a few days in March, when the information would have been disclosed.
The State Attorney’s Office, which represents García Ortiz and prosecutor Pilar Rodríguez in the process, has already denounced in writing that in this investigation the Central Operational Unit has cloned sensitive information “that can compromise the security of the ‘State”. In an organization as vertical as the prosecution, where the highest superior acts as the final filter, a dump like this has removed information not intended for the general public from the usual channels. Sources at the registry assure that among the documents seized are communications with heads of the fight against corruption, the prosecution for economic crimes and even with prosecutors from other countries.
The troubles within the public prosecutor’s office began with the management of judicial secrecy by Judge Hurtado. That day, he announced the opening of the procedure, asked García Ortiz to appoint a lawyer, placed the file under summary secrecy and ordered the searches, communicating only the operative part of the order: the list things that the Civil Guard had orders to take. The Attorney General appealed this order blindly, without knowing his arguments, but the other parties were able to view it in its entirety to make their own allegations. On Monday, the judge lifted the secrecy surrounding this resolution and it could be publicly consulted on the website of the General Council of the Judicial Power from early in the morning. The attorney general was not informed until midday.
In addition to presenting his protest against this file, Álvaro García Ortiz also addressed the judge to explain that the current procedure does not include the whole reality of this March 13, where he is accused of having disclosed the emails. The reality, asserts the Attorney General in his appeal, is that the first publications which reflected the complete content of the communications between Alberto González’s lawyer and the prosecution in search of an agreement were published by a media before he only receive this information in your personal email. And that at those times, it was Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Ayuso’s right-hand man within the regional government, who distributed part of these emails to several media journalists who ended up publishing this false information in its entirety.
The Attorney General asks Judge Hurtado to carry out, in practice, the investigation with Alberto González Amador and President Isabel Díaz Ayuso, because this first information, in addition to being prior to his intervention, cites sources close to the defense of the businessman. Neither from the public prosecutor’s office nor from the tax administration. And find out if the first to reveal these negotiations between the accused and the prosecution was González Amador’s entourage, even if it was to give a biased vision of the conversations and tip the balance of public opinion in his favor .
A few weeks in which Miguel Ángel Rodríguez personally assumed the public defense of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner, threatening elDiario.es with closure and spreading hoaxes about how journalists had tried to enter his house masked, among other things lies or half-truths intended to portray. the tax fraud case of Alberto González Amador as persecution by the state and the media against an “individual”.
Several causes in parallel
The option that the Attorney General proposed to Judge Hurtado is to call to testify both the journalists from half a dozen media outlets who published this information on the night of March 13 and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez himself. A proposal that was not well received at Puerta del Sol in Madrid. “It is an absolute irregularity,” Carlos Díaz-Pache, spokesperson for the PP in the Madrid Assembly, said on Thursday. “If you try to look for Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, they will find you,” also added Miguel Ángel García Martín, advisor to the Ayuso presidency. Rodríguez spoke through his account on the social network X to comment on the situation with the same “pa’lante” that he uses to predict judicial movements.
The case for revealing secrets about Alberto González Amador’s emails has progressed much more quickly than the initial proceedings in which the businessman is accused of double tax fraud of more than 350,000 euros. The cause of the emails analyzed in the publication by Judge Hurtado. The proceedings for revealing secrets were opened before the Superior Court of Madrid, they were taken to the Supreme Court for a reasoned presentation and saw half a dozen interrogations, appeals and a ten-hour search. In the tax fraud case of Alberto González Amador, so far no one has testified in court.
This lack of activity in the main cause of the entire network of procedures responds, on the one hand, to the fact that a good part of the investigation has already been carried out by the Tax Administration before being continued by the parquet. On the other hand, the possibility of the businessman reaching an agreement with the prosecution keeps the case pending. An agreement by which Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner offered to accept a symbolic prison sentence, to pay more than half a million euros between debts to the Treasury, fines and interest, but in exchange for avoiding to go to prison.
This agreement is currently on hold as the Supreme Court moves full steam ahead with the investigation into the leak of the original version of this agreement. The judge in charge of the fraud investigation accepted the request of the PSOE and Más Madrid to expand the case against him to investigate more crimes related to his relationship with the Quirón group and, in the meantime, his planned appearance for the end of November has been suspended.
While the calendar and judicial deadlines are fully in favor of the strategy of Alberto González Amador, who even wore a wig to hide from the cameras during his first visit to court, the commissioner decided to open a third front in front of the courts. Demand compensation from a dozen politicians and parties who spoke out on his case. In total, he is demanding 325,000 euros through civil proceedings in several lawsuits that range from the president of the government, Pedro Sánchez, to Madrid advisors like Rita Maestre. Only 25,000 euros less than he admitted to defrauding the Treasury by using a network of false invoices to save taxes on the million dollar commissions he took in buying and selling transactions of medical supplies during the pandemic.
The next step is in the hands of Supreme Court Justice Ángel Hurtado, who is awaiting an analysis from the Civil Guard of all communications intercepted in the October 30 registry and also has several options that go in opposite directions. On the one hand, the Attorney General requests his exoneration and, as main evidence, proposes that Alberto González Amador’s entourage explain whether he was the first to put his emails into circulation. On the other hand, the Professional and Independent Association of Prosecutors (APIF) presented itself as an accusation, demanded that the investigation into the communications of the Attorney General be even broader and even offered to testify on how Álvaro García Ortiz spoke with his ‘number 2’ during the recording.
