Yesterday, the Supreme Court’s ruling was announced, condemning the Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García Ortiz, to two years of disqualification from office and the payment of a fine to the aggrieved party for “revelation of a secret.” The aggrieved party is González Amador, the romantic partner of the President of the Community of Madrid. The process has monopolized Spanish press headlines for months, featuring the unusual image of an Attorney General sitting in the dock due to numerous indications, but, according to the Government, without incriminating hard evidence. Although it is true that upon learning of his indictment, he deleted all messages from his mobile phone that could have condemned… or exonerated him.
The whole thing began more than a year ago when, in a standard procedure, the lawyer for a citizen—who was until then anonymous, González Amador—acknowledged in an email to the Public Prosecutor’s Office that his client had evaded taxes and was willing to admit it in order to reach a plea agreement, as is customary, which would require him to pay the evaded amount plus a fine and thus avoid jail.
These types of agreements are common since the State’s interest lies more in collection than in the imprisonment of the defrauder. But everything went wrong when, at some point, someone in the Public Prosecutor’s Office—which is government-dependent—found out that González Amador was the romantic partner of President Sánchez’s major political rival, the President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Her chief of staff then leaked the idea to the press that the agreement between González Amador and the Prosecutor’s Office—which had initially proposed it—was frustrated by “orders from above,” so that Díaz Ayuso’s partner could be put on trial.
The Attorney General then began a frantic effort to obtain the email in which González Amador’s lawyer offered the deal to the prosecutor’s office (and not the reverse). A few hours after ending up in the Attorney General’s hands, this email appeared in the media and eventually reached La Moncloa, which also used it to attack the President of the Community of Madrid.
Several journalists—curiously, all from media outlets close to the Government—claimed they had known about this email before the Attorney General did. But none of them used it until García Ortiz had it in his possession, a moment when it is also proven that La Moncloa had it.
García Ortiz—who was determined to “win the narrative”—asserted in the trial that “the truth is not filtered, it is defended” and ended up issuing a press release that included textual quotes from the email exchange between González Amador’s lawyer and the prosecution office. This unusual press release led to a complaint being filed by the Madrid Bar Association, which also sought the conviction of the Attorney General.
Throughout the entire process, the Government, with its President at the helm, insisted on the Attorney General’s innocence, arguing that he was merely defending the truth. However, as deduced from the Supreme Court ruling, one cannot defend the truth at the expense of “revealing secrets,” that is, the defense strategy of an investigated person. This investigated person would never have jumped to the front pages of newspapers had he not been the sentimental partner of a political rival.
