The Supreme Court has asked the Public Prosecutor’s Office whether it should open a criminal case against Álvaro García Ortiz, the State Attorney General, for revealing secrets in the proceedings opened against Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner. The judges unify the complaints and accusations they have received against him, not only the reasoned statement of the High Court of Madrid following the complaint of Alberto González Amador himself, and request a report from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which in recent months has shown itself against the existence of the revelation of secrets in a statement with which it intended to deny various hoaxes about the case.
The decision on whether or not to charge the Attorney General will be in the hands of a court of five magistrates chaired by Manuel Marchena and with Susana Polo as rapporteur, as well as Antonio del Moral, Juan Ramón Berdugo and Carmen Lamela. In addition to the reasoned statement from the TSJM, the judges will also study a complaint from Manos Limpias and the Freedom and Alternative Forum Foundationwhich includes, among others, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, the PP deputy in Madrid Daniel Portero, the former minister Jaime Mayor Oreja and Fernando Savater.
The High Court of Madrid left the case in the hands of the Criminal Division of the Supreme Court last July, when the investigating judge submitted a reasoned statement pointing out the need to charge García Ortiz as the person most responsible for the statement. “In our opinion, the proper continuation of the present proceedings would require their comparison with the version of the facts that the Attorney General of the State could give,” explained the order with which the TSJM left the future of the Attorney General’s proceedings in the hands of the division presided over by Manuel Marchena in the Supreme Court.
The case began in the Madrid court after Alberto González Amador denounced that a statement issued by the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office regarding his case had revealed confidential information from the conversations that his defense and the Public Prosecutor’s Office had held to reach a possible agreement. The Public Prosecutor’s Office has always maintained that the statement did not reveal any information unknown to the public and that its objective was to refute hoaxes and false information that several media had spread in the previous hours, implying that the possible agreement between González Amador and the Prosecutor’s Office had been cut short by orders of the top prosecutors.
The case brought by Judge Francisco Goyena in the High Court of Madrid was initially directed against prosecutor Julián Salto and also against Pilar Rodríguez, both as defendants. The first is the economic crimes prosecutor who investigated and reported Alberto González Amador for tax fraud and document falsification, and who also spoke with the businessman’s lawyer for a hypothetical agreement. The second is his superior, chief prosecutor of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Madrid.
The former explained to the judge that he had complied with the orders given to him to provide the emails he had exchanged with Alberto González’s lawyer. The latter explained that the order to issue the statement came from the Attorney General’s Office. During the proceedings, Almudena Lastra, the senior prosecutor of Madrid, and the press chief of the agency in the capital also appeared as witnesses. Before the judge, Lastra also explained that the order to deny the hoaxes spread by, among others, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, came directly and in writing from the Attorney General.
Throughout the case, the Prosecutor’s Office filed several appeals and requests for the case to be closed or for the complaint of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner to be dismissed, and the Attorney General himself wrote to the judge to explain, as he had already done in public, that the order and the initiative to issue the statement had been his, although he argued that the objective was not to reveal confidential data about the case but to refute hoaxes published in the previous hours.
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