Ángel Hurtado has become the new proper name of the Supreme Court after four years going unnoticed in its Criminal Chamber. The magistrate, one of the last to join Manuel Marchena’s department, sent the elite unit of the Civil Guard to the attorney general’s office on Wednesday to take all his communications: emails, cell phone messages and even notebooks and notebooks. The first major case that falls into the hands of this judge, who arrived in 2020 from the National Court after standing out for his opposition to the Popular Party being harmed by the Gürtel case or to Mariano Rajoy testifying in the trial of this corruption plot.
The investigator of the case entered the judicial career in 1983 and practiced in the Canary Islands, Euskadi and Madrid before making the leap to the Provincial Court of Madrid – where he tackled a robber for committing crimes despite being religious – and from there to the National Court in 2006. Hurtado, of conservative tendency but without being attached to any association, arrived at the central court at a time when ETA terrorism monopolized the courtrooms. .
As a speaker, he signed dozens of sentences in the National Court that condemned the perpetrators of the Santa Pola attack, the murderers of the councilor. José Ignacio Iruretagoyena or to the managers of the herrikotaverns accused of collaborating with terrorists. Many of his sentences, as speaker or as signatory, survived the trial of cassation, but others did not pass the filter of the Supreme Court: those that condemned the members of Segi or some about jihadist terrorism such as the sentence of five years to Wissam Loftithe butcher from Burgos who was convicted of financing terrorists and who was finally acquitted. He also questioned the way in which his colleagues applied the European ruling on the ‘Parot doctrine‘ to free ETA prisoners.
Almost a decade ago his name became the protagonist of one of the cases called to change the political scenario in Spain: the Gürtel plot. Magistrate Enrique López, later advisor to Isabel Díaz Ayuso, was removed from the court due to his closeness to the PP and the presentation of the sentence of the main branch of the case fell into the hands of Hurtado. And it was then that he was left alone defending that the party should never have been condemned for benefiting financially from the plot and that Mariano Rajoy should not even appear as a witness.
The image was recorded in the summer of 2017. Ángel Hurtado presided over the court of the case and was in charge of bluntly cutting off all the questions that, in his opinion, went beyond the possibilities offered by the visit of the President of the Government as witness. A few days before he had objected in writing to his having to testify. Because he understood that he did not contribute anything, that he could unexpectedly harm several defendants or that, due to his position in the leadership of the PP, he did not have to know what was happening in Pozuelo or Majadahonda. He also alleged that he did so so as not to harm his work as head of the Executive.
Hurtado was left alone defending, for example, that Rajoy could appear electronically at the National Court, something “less disturbing for the performance of the functions of his office” and avoiding the “public exposure” of going to the trial in person. He also warned about how the declaration of the PP leader could be used for political motivations “in areas other than the judiciary.” Rajoy declared and his Government did not fall because of his testimony. He did so a year later when the Court ruled that the PP had to return more than 240,000 euros as a lucrative participant.
A sentence that Hurtado did not want to sign. The magistrate left the presentation in the hands of his colleagues because, in his opinion, there were too many allusions to the symbiotic relationship between Gürtel and a PP that was not part of the dock of the accused but of the economic beneficiaries. And he also explained in judicial terms an argument that the party has put forward for years before public opinion: that corrupt politicians and businessmen acted behind the party’s back, not with its knowledge.
Hurtado’s criteria in the Gürtel case did not convince to his companions nor to the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, which two years later confirmed almost the entire sentence and, with it, the financial sanction to the PP for financing itself with the activity of the plot in some of its fiefdoms in the Community of Madrid. The high court ratified this sentence in October 2020. By then, Ángel Hurtado had left his office at the National Court and was already one more in the Supreme Court that had just radically contradicted his opinion in the most relevant corruption case of the last two. decades.
A secret case against the attorney general
Ángel Hurtado arrived at the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court in injury timeappointed by an expired Council of the Judiciary that was still operating with the majority of Mariano Rajoy’s first government and a few months after a legal change blocked the ability of this body to appoint the judicial leadership until there was renewal. He entered together with Leopoldo Puente and Javier Hernández thanks to an overwhelming majority of 19 votes in favor in the governing body of the judges.
Considered a judge very close to Manuel Marchena, the president of the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court, Hurtado joined the Criminal Chamber in November 2020. It was a few days after his new colleagues certified the failure of his theory about the PP in the Gürtel case and a few months before the Supreme Court overturned a ruling from his presentation on an alleged jihadist whom he had sentenced to five years in prison when he was a judge in the Appeal Chamber of the Court National. The Supreme Court accused him to “unilaterally” modify the proven facts of that case, among other corrective measures.
In these four years, Hurtado has maintained the traditional low profile of the judges newly incorporated into the Chamber, although unlike his colleagues in promotion, he has been left out of the courts of relevant cases. One of his first sentences convicted two leaders of Nazi music groups, an agent for revealing secrets from police databases, several defendants of the ‘Serrallo case’ of corruption in Granada, or the mining businessman Victorino Alonso. His is also the sentence revealed by elDiario.es that acquitted two accused of group abuse of a minor under 13 years of age due to her “symmetry of age and maturity” with the victim.
In his first years in the Chamber he has also been in charge of studying complaints and complaints against authorized persons, disallowing criminal actions against Pedro Sánchez, Ione BelarraIrene Montero or Meritxell Batet filed by ultra organizations such as HazteOir or a group linked to the ultra agitator Cristina Seguí. The criminal investigation against the State Attorney General has been, due to the Chamber’s distribution system, the first investigation to fall into his hands and the first case that he has directed for more than two decades.
Hurtado now faces the cause of greatest public importance since his abrupt passage through the Gürtel case sentence that ended up overthrowing Mariano Rajoy’s Government. His first move was to give the person under investigation five days to appoint a lawyer and then send the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard to clone all his electronic devices. A case about an alleged revelation of secrets that has started with the revelation of a record and a judicial order that, in theory, were also under summary secrecy in the Criminal Court.
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