Dolores Delgado’s tortuous tenure as attorney general

Delgado arrived at the Attorney General’s Office in February 2020, after the signing of the government agreement between PSOE and United We Can. That same day a rights race against her and her nomination began. PP and Vox appealed to the Supreme Court for the appointment of the prosecutor because they considered that she could not exercise that function since, until then, she had served as Minister of Justice and she had previously been a member of the PSOE.

A year and a half later, the High Court not only rejected those appeals. In separate sentences published in November, he reprimanded these two formations for trying to exercise, without being legitimated to do so, a “popular action of a political nature” to appeal appointments and acts of the Government. Two magistrates out of seven voted against the court’s decision.

The main opposition, however, came from within the Prosecutor’s Office itself. The conservative and majority Association of Prosecutors (AF) issued a statement against his appointment even before he took office. On January 13, when Pedro Sánchez announced that he would propose Delgado, that association expressed its “surprise” at the news and its “discomfort and concern about the image and lack of independence and impartiality transmitted.”

In the fall of the following year, the conservative association began to harden its tone against the prosecutor as a result of a report in which its ‘number two’, the Supreme Prosecutor’s lieutenant, Luis Navajas, asked to dismiss twenty complaints against the Government. for his management of the health emergency due to the coronavirus. Navajas affirmed that two fellow prosecutors from the High Court “ideologically contaminated” tried to “influence” him on how he had to act in relation to the complaints. The AF considered that this had plunged the prosecutor’s career into “the greatest discredit” in “forty years” and they asked Delgado to abandon his “complicit silence” and act against him.

The dismissal of the prosecutor Stampa

Barely two months after that statement, the Association of Prosecutors demanded Delgado’s resignation for the first time. In a statement, he considered that the attorney general lacked suitability due to her political background and her “erratic and sectarian actions.” The group understood that his decisions had “caused serious damage to the prestige of the Public Prosecutor’s Office” and that his permanence in office was “incompatible with impartiality and the constitutional principles that govern” the institution.

In that text, the FA did not explicitly mention it, but the statement came just days after the Prosecutor’s Office defended Delgado’s impartiality in the Fiscal Council in the decision, taken a year earlier, to remove Ignacio Stampa from Anticorruption, one of the two prosecutors in charge of the Villarejo case. That week the prosecutor had filed a claim for assets for undermining his career in which he accused Delgado of maneuvering guided by a “personal and direct interest” in that case, which contained “indications” of “the participation of his sentimental partner ”, Baltasar Garzón, who defended several investigated.

The conservative association demanded in a statement that the prosecutor explain in a “very detailed” manner these “alleged maneuvers” and the Professional and Independent Association of Prosecutors (APIF) asked her in turn to clarify a matter of “maximum seriousness” and ” allegedly riddled with irregularities.”

Delgado has always argued that he followed the criteria of the Fiscal Council, where he was not supported by the five members of the conservative association, to which he was associated, nor by the four members of the Progressive Union of Prosecutors (UPF), from which he came. the attorney general. At that time, the prosecutor had been denounced by Vox for collusion with Pablo Iglesias and Podemos, the party that exercises the popular accusation in the case about the dark businesses of the commissioner and other members of the police leadership. The investigation against Stampa for these facts was finally archived.

The former prosecutor in the Villarejo case accuses Delgado and his team of having artificially delayed that investigation, which ended up in the file, and of later hiding its result from the Fiscal Council to avoid receiving the support he needed to obtain the position he occupied in Anticorruption in an interim The State Attorney General’s Office defends the need for the additional proceedings that it ordered the Madrid prosecutor in charge of the case to carry out.

Controversy over appointments

The appointments made by Dolores Delgado in the high levels of the Prosecutor’s Office were the constant subject of controversy since her arrival at the top of the Public Ministry after passing through the Ministry of Justice. In this section, the conservative association of prosecutors reappears, which denounced Delgado on several occasions for allegedly benefiting her former group, the UPF, in the appointments within the leadership of the Prosecutor’s Office.

In December 2020, for example, the five members that this association then had on the Fiscal Council abstained when it proposed Juan Ignacio Campos as deputy prosecutor of the Supreme Court, the only one who had applied for the position. The reason, they said, was not the candidate himself, but the fact that some media had published that he was the favorite for the job.

The AF went from criticizing some of these appointments to taking them to court, in some cases successfully. In April of this year, the Supreme Court annulled the appointment of Eduardo Esteban as juvenile prosecutor and ordered the process to be repeated because it understood that Delgado had not sufficiently motivated his decision. Less than two months ago, Delgado reappointed Esteban to that position, despite the Supreme Court’s annulment. This decision angered the conservative association, which accused the attorney general of flouting the sentence.

The attorney general experienced another difficult moment at the head of the institution less than half a year ago, when the PSOE sent Congress an amendment in the processing of the Bankruptcy Law reform with which it intended to modify the assumptions in which the Prosecutor’s Office is obliged to inform the Government of ongoing investigations. Half of the Supreme Court prosecutors demanded Delgado through a letter to stop the amendment, considering that it represented “a significant breach of the autonomy and independence” of the institution. In that amendment, the Socialists had included a section that guaranteed the prosecutor a position in the Supreme Court after leaving her position.

The letter against it was signed by heavyweights from the Public Ministry: the procés prosecutors Javier Zaragoza, Jaime Moreno and Fidel Cadena, the computer crime prosecutor Elvira Tejada or the former Anticorruption prosecutor Manuel Moix, among others. It was also signed by two former State Attorney Generals: Consuelo Madrigal and María José Segarra. The PSOE finally withdrew the controversial amendment.

Defeat in the Fiscal Council elections

While Delgado was recovering from the surgery on his back that he underwent last April, UPF, the association to which he belonged, collapsed in the elections to the Fiscal Council, which gave the absolute majority to the conservative AF and in which the minority and very critical of the attorney general APIF got a seat on that advisory body for the first time.

The prosecutor was thus at the head of an openly hostile Fiscal Council, with an overwhelming majority of conservative prosecutors, the same ones who made a frontal opposition to her since her arrival at the top of the institution. The opinion of the Fiscal Council is not binding to propose an appointment, but the 1983 rule that regulates its operation specifies that it must “be heard regarding the appointment of the various positions.”

The Archive of the Inquiry into the King’s Fortune

During Dolores Delgado’s mandate, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has investigated a series of important cases. Namely, the case about the company of the parents of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, the case of the commissioners of the masks of the Madrid City Council or the contract with the Community of Madrid for which the brother of Isabel Díaz Ayuso charged a commission. For this last case, Anticorruption, hierarchically dependent on Delgado, argued with the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which today continues to investigate the possible embezzlement of EU funds.

However, the most relevant case that has passed through the desks of the Public Ministry at this stage is that of the opaque origin of Juan Carlos I’s fortune, a triple investigation that the Prosecutor’s Office filed in March of this year, considering that the alleged crimes had prescribed or were committed when the then Head of State enjoyed inviolability.

The investigations had begun more than two years ago in three separate branches: the millionaire commissions that the king emeritus would have received for his intervention in the award of the AVE works to Mecca, the use of undeclared funds from a Mexican millionaire, revealed by elDiario.es, and, finally, his relationship with several million hidden on the island of Jersey. The Prosecutor’s Office, then, pointed out that it had “detected fees defrauded by the king emeritus between 2008 and 2012, all prescribed except those of 2012, when he was also protected by inviolability.” But he accepted the regularizations that the emeritus king made before the Ministry of Finance, despite the fact that he had been previously notified that they were investigating him.

Due to her health problems, Dolores Delgado ends a mandate full of turbulence, harassed by a hostile opposition that has also grown after her last electoral result, due to her health problems. Álvaro García Ortiz, her ‘number two’ until now and the substitute that the Government has thought for the position, will have to build her leadership in a refractory scenario. As an appetizer, the PP has already questioned its “independence” for participating in a PSOE conference three years ago.