economy and politics

A third witness claimed to know the confession of Ayuso’s partner before the attorney general

Miguel Ángel Rodríguez's messages with Ayuso's partner show that he knowingly lied about the pact with the Prosecutor's Office

Three witnesses stated last week before Judge Ángel Hurtado, of the Supreme Court, that they knew the details of the negotiations between Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner and the Prosecutor’s Office before that information reached the State Attorney General. The transcripts of these interrogations, to which elDiario.es has had access, reveal that journalist Esteban Urreiztieta (El Mundo), admitted before the judge that on the night of March 13, when he published information at 9:29 p.m., he had already He knew that the businessman’s defense and prosecutor Julián Salto were exploring the possibility of accepting a sentence that did not imply his entry into prison.

Two other journalists, José Precedo (elDiario.es) and Miguel Ángel Campos (Cadena SER) also explained that they accessed this information before the attorney general, Álvaro García Ortiz, claimed it and it was later published by various media.

Judge Ángel Hurtado took statements last week from a dozen witnesses, the vast majority of them journalists from different media outlets who between March 13 and 14 published various information about the case of Alberto González Amador and his exchange of emails with the Prosecutor’s office looking for a pact. The first media to publish something was the newspaper El Mundo at 9:29 p.m. on March 13, stating that it had been the Public Ministry that had offered the pact a few days before, when the reality – later expressed explicitly in updated versions of the news – was that the businessman’s defense had acknowledged the crimes in exchange for an agreement that would prevent him from going to prison.

In his appearance as a witness, Esteban Urreiztieta defended the veracity of his information and refused to reveal his sources, as did the rest of the journalists called to testify. His first information reflected the email that the prosecutor Julián Salto sent to the lawyer Carlos Neira, explaining that it was possible to reach an agreement, and that news attributed the initiative to the Prosecutor’s Office when, in reality, it had been the businessman’s defense that one month Before, in February 2024, he had offered a pact.

Urreiztieta defended before Judge Hurtado that his information was true and that from its first version it included allusions to two-way negotiations that, he claims, he was aware of, although he had not seen the February email whose leak cements the case against the attorney general. “We did not have the email of February 2 at the time,” the journalist acknowledged, but he did know “the terms in which it was, on which the negotiation was revolving.” “These are data provided to us by the sources that participated in the conversations.”

This information, later updated when other media published the existence and content of the previous email where González Amador’s defense accepted eight months in prison and offered to pay a fine in exchange for avoiding prison, alluded to the fact that in the previous months the Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner had tried to avoid the complaint without success. For example, paying 400,000 euros more in the 2022 tax return, a strategy rejected by the Treasury and before the case was in the hands of the Prosecutor’s Office. It also reflected, in generic terms, the usual conditions in this type of pact: pay a fine and accept a prison sentence that does not imply mandatory imprisonment.

Case against the attorney general

Judge Hurtado investigates whether Álvaro García Ortiz and two of his collaborators in the Prosecutor’s Office leaked to the press the email in which Carlos Neira offered the confession of Ayuso’s partner in his tax fraud case. A leak that, according to the magistrate, led to its full publication on the morning of March 14 and in which, in addition and always according to the judge’s latest orders, even Moncloa was involved.

The Prosecutor’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office tried to demonstrate in these testimonies that several people had access to this email or to the details of the negotiation before the attorney general obtained that information, provided by prosecutor Julián Salto on the night of March 13 when The Public Prosecutor’s Office set out to deny various false news about the case and gathered all the information available that they were unaware of until that moment.

According to his testimony, Esteban Urreiztieta knew the details of those negotiations, although not the email that is the focus of the investigation, before it reached the hands of the attorney general. Two other informants who have testified in the Supreme Court and whose testimony has not changed the judge’s criteria have spoken in a similar sense: Miguel Ángel Campos, from Cadena SER, explained that he was able to examine the content of the email that same day but hours before and José Precedo, from elDiario.es, explained that he obtained all the information about the case on March 6. The first information revealed by the Prosecutor’s Office complaint against Alberto González was published exclusively by elDiario.es on March 12.

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