The cause of the supreme that investigates the filtration of the confession of Alberto González Amador has revealed the abyss that exists for months between the Attorney General and the Superior Prosecutor’s Office of Madrid. The accusations that attribute to García Ortiz the filtration of the mail with the confession of the Ayuso couple consider the testimony of Almudena Lastra, superior prosecutor of Madrid, to underpin the imputation of the maximum representative of the Public Ministry for criticism and suspicions that the person responsible of the Prosecutor’s Office in Madrid has expressed before Judge Ángel Hurtado.
The State Advocacy, which defends García Ortiz and the provincial prosecutor of Madrid, two of the three prosecutors charged in the case, however, he understands that Lastra has not told the truth: last week one of his representatives openly accused this prosecutor having lied to the judge and came to propose, without success, that he had to declare again.
Almudena Lastra is the head of the Prosecutor’s Office in Madrid since mid -2021 and learned last March seven that one of her prosecutors had denounced the couple of Isabel Díaz Ayuso for fiscal fraud. According to his story, in the Supreme Court, the Attorney General’s Office requested all the information in the case through an accounts, the official duct to inform the superiors when a case can have public significance. According to Lastra, she did not know more about the subject until day 12 in the morning: when Eldiario.es revealed exclusively that the businessman had been denounced for defrauding 350,000 euros to the Treasury.
Lastra, who has been facing the Attorney General for months, has testified twice in this case. The first was last June when the case was processed before the Superior Court of Madrid and the process was not yet directed against Álvaro García Ortiz. The second was on January 16, when he appeared before Judge Ángel Hurtado in the Supreme Court. On both occasions the prosecutor and exvocal of the Judiciary has been critical of the management of the case on the night of March 13: as she told the Court, she also agreed to deny the false news that several media published on the case and that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, head of the Cabinet of the Regional President was spreading, but disagreed on how it was made and the amount of data contained in the statement.
The different testimonies, statements and proceedings of the case have made it clear that the relationship between both factions of the Public Ministry is very deteriorated. “The whole fiscal and judicial curia knows. There is a disaffection of Mrs. Lastra to whom we directed the Spanish Prosecutor’s Office, ”explained the Attorney General in his appearance. But it was the lawyer of the Zaida Fernández state, who defends the provincial prosecutor Pilar Rodríguez, who openly accused Lastra of missing the truth in several points of his statement: “My assessment is that it is a lie, honor.”
The state lawyer openly questioned Lastra’s testimony in the final stretch of the declaration as accused of Rodríguez on January 30. “What we are questioning is not only the credibility of the witness, but many of the bases that you maintain are the ones that the witness affirms and this for us is important,” he added shortly after to the judge. “It does not let me explain or does not let him explain the reasons why he considers that Mrs. Lastra has lied in certain statements that affect my sponsor,” he also said minutes later in the same Supreme Hall.
“I am not going to allow it or Mrs. Lastra will come again,” said the judge when the State lawyer exposed the possibility that the superior prosecutor of Madrid would declare again to solve those contradictions. “I don’t allow you to say it’s a lie. It is a different and end opinion, ”said the magistrate later, after lowering the matter to“ contradictions and discrepancies ”about one of the testimonies considered key by accusations and by Hurtado himself in his most recent cars.
The March 12 meeting
The contradictions between Almudena Lastra’s testimony revolve around two relevant aspects of the case: how he learned that lawyer González Amador tried to reach a pact with the Prosecutor’s Office even before being denounced on March 5, 2024, and also by the suspicions and reluctance that he expressed in those days about the leaks of the cause. Lastra defends that on the morning of March 12, shortly after the exclusive of Eldiario.es, prosecutor Julián Salto explained to her and Pilar Rodríguez who had been crossing emails with her lawyer Carlos Neira for weeks, whom she knew of other cases and with which he had even spoken in person of the subject.
In his testimony Lastra was very clear: “Julian explained to the provincial chief prosecutor and me how all communication with Mr. Neira had been. He had directed the request to the generic mail of the Economic section for the conformities, that the boss had passed it and he had already maintained the conversations of his mail with Mr. Neira and had been answering until that last mail of 12 March ”.
Salto, the prosecutor who filed the complaint, and the head of the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office, Rodríguez, deny that version of the meeting. The first assures that he did not account for those emails until he was officially asked Having stopped an agreement with Ayuso’s couple for “orders from above.” Pilar Rodríguez affirmed exactly the same as the prosecutor of the case. “He did not talk about the Iter of the Posts,” said Julián Salto in his testimony. “Not flatly. That did not happen, ”added Pilar Rodríguez a few days later as accused. “It didn’t take place. I know the existence of the emails on the night of March 13 ”. More than 24 hours later.
García Ortiz’s defense considers that fundamental data since it alleges, in line with what the Supreme has defended in other causes, that if the information about the emails circulated before, it cannot be considered revelation of secrets.
The provincial prosecutor of Madrid, subordinated by Lastra in the Public Ministry, added that the Attorney General’s Office had previously activated the process of accounts and that, having known something like that, it should have communicated it immediately. “I would have had to account for those emails.” Something that the attorney general endorsed in his statement: “If there had been that meeting [donde supuestamente se informó de la existencia de esos correos] they would have had to realize the relevant data. ”
“We made a mistake, from the Superior Prosecutor’s Office”
The March 12 meeting existed because all those who participated in it have recognized (it was a meeting to address issues about the digitalization of files) but two of the three protagonists deny that the negotiations between the lawyer of the lawyer between the lawyer Ayuso’s couple and the prosecutor of the case. That is not the only clash of versions between what Lastra affirmed in the Supreme Court as a witness and what was defended by Rodríguez, who came as investigated. The Superior Prosecutor, for example, said in her testimony that she was very clear with her subordinated on the night of March 13, in full informative crisis caused by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez’s Bulos: “I expressly told him, why do you send him the emails, pilar? They will filter them. ”
He alluded to the sending of those emails that the attorney general was claiming to deny through a public state ”, When it had happened on the contrary.
“Not flatly. He didn’t tell me anything about that tenor. Not at all, ”said Pilar Rodríguez about that conversation. The provincial prosecutor of Madrid also accused Lastra, her superior in Madrid, of making this type of comments on the Prosecutor’s Office and the leaks outside the environment of the Public Ministry: “It is one of the many phrases that Mrs. Lastra is accustomed to saying about of the State Attorney General’s Office, ”he said during the interrogation. “Usual comments,” he added, “in front of people who are not part of the fiscal career.”
Almudena Lastra’s anger with the Attorney General’s Office for his management of that part of González Amador’s case is no secret. She herself stated in her testimony that on the morning of March 14 she was “a little burned with this matter,” and reported how her tense conversations with the Attorney General were to issue an informative note by deniving the information of the cause that both coincided in qualifying as false.
The attorney general, in his statement, came to point to the “error” that supposed not to publicly inform the case as of March 7, when they already knew that the denounced was a couple of the Madrid president. “We made an error, from the Superior Prosecutor’s Office a mistake was made (…) we should have given a press release,” he lamented. As had happened, for example, when the one denounced for fiscal fraud was a footballer or an artist.
The State Advocacy, which defends in this case both the attorney general García Ortiz and the provincial prosecutor Rodríguez, doubt of the veracity of many points of Lastra’s testimony but the judge, for the moment, understands that they do not go from being mere ” contradictions and discrepancies ”that do not affect the core of the cause: determine who leaked the email of González Amador’s lawyer. The attorney general nuanced the one who, then, was the real reason for his anger on the March 14 state If we gave information that had already been published. ”
Source: www.eldiario.es
