The criminal investigation into the leak of emails from Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner is not limited to determining whether the information came from the prosecution. It is also analyzing, since Monday, whether maneuvers have been hatched within the PSOE or Moncloa itself to distribute these emails. The judge of the Supreme Court, Ángel Hurtado, summoned Juan Lobato, general secretary of the Socialists of Madrid, on Friday with the order to provide alleged notarial acts that include this strategy to display Alberto’s confession in the González Assembly Amador. . At the same time, the instructor already has on the table a first report in which the Civil Guard directly names the public prosecutor’s office as the origin of the leak, although for the moment without conclusive evidence.
The judge’s latest decision comes hours after the ABC newspaper published that last November Juan Lobato went to a notary in Madrid to record messages related to the leak. The version proposed by this media is that on March 14 of this year, Pilar Sánchez Acera, then chief of staff of Óscar López at La Moncloa, suggested that he discuss in the Madrid Assembly the email in which Alberto González Amador, Isabel’s partner, Díaz Ayuso, admitted two tax crimes and proposed a deal to the prosecutor’s office. Lobato refused and, according to the newspaper Vocento, Sánchez Acera announced that he would disclose the information to a media outlet.
Lobato did not deny the existence of this visit to the notary with the messages, but he takes an opposite approach to what happened: he did it, according to a press release, to demonstrate that neither he nor neither the PSOE nor Moncloa received information on the case of Alberto González Amador which had not yet been published by the media and, even less, by the prosecution.
The leader of the PSOE from Madrid is obliged to tell the truth during his appearance on Friday and to provide the notarial documents in which he would have reflected these messages. The investigating judge of the Attorney General wants to know if the emails in which Carlos Neira, Alberto González’s lawyer, admitted his double tax fraud of 350,000 euros and proposed a pact to avoid prison, were circulating in more places and not just within the prosecution. .
Lobato’s testimony falls between two dates and the time he allegedly exchanged these messages will be key to knowing whether the case moves down this new path. The events date back to March 14 of this year: two days after elDiario.es revealed that the public prosecutor’s office had denounced Alberto González Amador for double taxation fraud, and just hours after a report from El Mundo revealed a movement across the entire public prosecutor’s office. to deny the hoax according to which the pact came from the prosecution and not the other way around.
These are the key hours of the case. When the newspaper Unidad Editorial published this information, around nine o’clock in the evening on March 13, and from that moment on, the Attorney General instructed the Madrid Provincial Prosecutor to compile these emails. The goal, as Álvaro García Ortiz himself has repeatedly acknowledged, was to issue a statement denying the inaccuracies published about how this pact was created.
Lobato appeared the next morning, shortly before eleven o’clock on the morning of March 14, at the plenary session of the Madrid Assembly. The first appearance of Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the regional parliament after elDiario.es revealed the case that fully affected her companion. And there, the leader of the Madrid socialists held up, with some crossed out fragments, the email with which Alberto González Amador’s lawyer recognized that “two crimes have certainly been committed against the Public Treasury”.
“Yesterday you lied and today we have in the media the proof of the lie, the recognition that there was a crime,” Lobato told the Assembly. By then, in addition to all the news from the night before, several media outlets had already published the email in their digital edition and Lobato implied that the paper he was holding up had in fact been stolen from a media.
Until now, the case led by the Supreme Court against the Attorney General had focused on the night of March 13 and the exchange of emails and messages between Álvaro García Ortiz and several members of the prosecution to find out whether it was him, or someone under his command, who leaked the email to media outlets who, between the late hours of that day and the early hours of the next, alluded to or referred to its contents published in his entirety. Now Lobato’s testimony broadens the field of inquiry into whether, in parallel or in a related way, relevant people in the PSOE maneuvered to disseminate it.
This new branch of the case began on March 14 on Lobato’s phone but resurfaced at the beginning of November, almost eight months later, when the politician decided to go to a notary to record these messages. , a recording that will now have to be shown to Judge Hurtado at the Supreme Court. His visit to the notary came a few days after the magistrate sent the Civil Guard to the Attorney General’s Office to intervene during seven months of communications on the subject. Clean Hands asked Sánchez Acera herself to testify.
The Civil Guard designates the prosecution
Judge Ángel Hurtado signed Lobato’s summons this Monday, shortly after making available to the parties the first report of the Civil Guard on the case. A 57-page document in which the agents of the Central Operational Unit, after analyzing the messages and emails of the provincial prosecutor of Madrid, Pilar Rodríguez, in these days of March, deduce that the most plausible option is that the origin of this and other leaks in the case comes from the prosecution, attributing to Álvaro García Ortiz a “preeminent” role in the events that led to the leak.
The instructor was very clear in his orders and decisions and repeatedly explained to the UCO that the objective was to find out whether the Prosecutor’s Office had disclosed these emails. The UCO, in a report signed by the person responsible for key reports in the case of the ERE of Andalusia, goes further and speculates that the exclusivity of elDiario.es on the case of Alberto González Amador finds its origin in the floor. The reason: it was published on March 12 a few hours before the businessman himself had access to the complaint that had been filed against him. Forgetting that the complaint itself had been filed seven days earlier and since then it had been in the hands of the Madrid courts.
From there, the UCO reconstructs the accelerated exchange of messages between the Attorney General, several of his closest collaborators in the prosecution and the provincial prosecutor of Madrid, so that the prosecutor in charge of the case, who at that moment -there was attending a football match, sent the emails in question in order to be able to publish a statement clarifying how the conversations between Alberto González’s lawyer and the prosecution had developed with a view to a possible agreement.
The emails contain something that the Attorney General himself has admitted out loud and in writing: that he directed this search for information, but not to disclose anything to the press, but to publish the statement. The intercepted messages addressed to prosecutor Pilar Rodríguez show the extent to which all of her interlocutors are convinced that they are doing the right thing and that the statement they finally issue does not reveal any secret information about the case. They also show the poor relations between the General Prosecutor’s Office and the Madrid Public Prosecutor’s Office.
What these messages do not contain is any evidence that the prosecution gave the order or indication to send these emails to the press. UCO investigators conclude that the Attorney General played a “preeminent” role in obtaining and managing these emails, which is already known, and deduce that the leak “must begin” within the prosecution because the dates and times match. By omitting data not collected in the emails analyzed, such as the fact that these emails were then in a mailbox to which more than 15 prosecutors have access or that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez himself, right-hand man of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, had distributed part of their content to several media outlets.
The Civil Guard asks for several things in its report and the judge granted the most important: copying and carefully analyzing the intercepted emails and messages from the Attorney General between March 8 and 14. This part of the case is still subject to summary secrecy and the judge still has several decisions to make on the table: whether he should call to testify several journalists who published information on the case or whether he should authorize the appearance of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez to explain whether the first to divulge the information was precisely the chief of staff of Alberto González’s partner Amador.
