The cause for the filtration of an email of Isabel Díaz Ayuso is at the doors of trial with a new unknown for the Supreme Court: if Judge Ángel Hurtado can precautionaryly suspend Álvaro García Ortiz as State Attorney General. The case instructor has given the parties three days to rule on the request for urgent measures of one of the accusations that he rejected last November. A movement in the line of what the Popular Party has been asking for a year: that Álvaro García Ortiz resigns.
The Appeals Chamber defined a few days ago what the trial for the publication in the press of the fiscal fraud of Alberto González Amador. The judges, with a vote against which he opted to archive the case between criticism of Hurtado for ignoring the indications that made it impossible to think that García Ortiz would have been the first to disseminate confidential data, confirmed the processing of the Attorney General, but corrected the instructor and left Pilar Rodríguez, provincial prosecutor of Madrid, out of the cause due to lack of evidence. There is only one procedure before putting the trial date: Hurtado signs the order to open oral trial.
A request for accusations has opened the door to a new unpublished situation in a judicial case already plagued by things never seen in the Spanish courts. The Professional and Independent Association of Prosecutors (APIF), with a representative in the Fiscal Council, belligerent against the Attorney General and defended by the prosecutor in leave José Antonio Frago, has asked the judge to have, as soon as he opened oral trial, precautionary suspends Álvaro García Ortiz as State Attorney General.
This association had as a spokesman Salvador Viaada, prosecutor of the Supreme Court now retired who has requested in tens of occasions the resignation of García Ortiz and who came to testify before Judge Hurtado. At that time, the APIF tried to promote a line of investigation to know if the attorney general had manipulated his mobile phone with the Lieutenant Prosecutor of the Supreme during the Civil Guard records. The minutes showed that by the time Viada said he had seen the attorney general with his phone in his hand, the UCO had already returned it.
It is not the first time that Hurtado is facing this request for urgent measures. Last October, a few days after the supreme opened the proceedings then arrived from the Superior Court of Madrid, both the APIF and the Pseudo Union Manos Clean requested the same. In that case, they claimed that García Ortiz could not continue in the position and be the hierarchical superior of the Lieutenant Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, who was going to represent the Public Ministry in the case.
The doubts about the new debate, which arises with the already firm processing of the attorney general and waiting for the more than predictable opening of oral trial, are not the same as there were then. Hurtado dispatched the petition with a negative based, above all, that there was a “commitment to abstention” by the attorney general himself, who had left in writing several times that he would not use his position to intervene in the procedure. In addition, he added, the lieutenant prosecutor María Ángeles Sánchez Conde had the ability to avoid it and he, in any case, was not the competent to decide.
“It does not correspond to this instructor to agree on the interested precautionary suspension. If this is so for the members of the fiscal career, that suspension will not be agreed,” he said then. These arguments are repeated in the new request and it remains to be seen if Hurtado gives them the same answer as then.
The new request expands the unknowns, but many had an answer in that first November car. The Regulation of the Fiscal Ministry establishes that the Attorney General may cease a prosecutor when he opens an oral trial against him. A first bump will be to elucidate whether the State Attorney General is considered or not part of the Public Ministry and if, therefore, the regulation is applied. Also, since there is a regulation of their own, Judge Hurtado or any other judge can impose some kind of precautionary measure when everything is an internal procedure of the Prosecutor’s Office. Until now, the magistrate has said no.
A Special Services Prosecutor
The Fiscal Ministry regulations have an article specifically dedicated to explaining when a prosecutor may be suspended in a precautionary manner. And expressly quotes: “When the Oral trial opening order is issued for crime committed in the exercise of their functions or on the occasion of them.” The decision must be made “the head of the Attorney General’s Office” giving hearing to the accused and also to the Fiscal Council.
The first doubt is, precisely, Álvaro García Ortiz is a member of the Fiscal Ministry to whom this regulation can be applied. Prosecutor since the late 90s, García Ortiz has been in special services since September 2022, when he was appointed general prosecutor for the first time. As happens, for example, when a prosecutor enters the European Prosecutor’s Office.
This, according to the prosecution’s sources, is a first obstacle for Hurtado to apply the regulation to the case of García Ortiz, since it is in special services and does not form, at least right now, part of the fiscal career even if it is its headquarters. In addition to understanding that it is, in any case, an internal procedure of the Prosecutor’s Office.
The APIF, which has come to ask for more years in jail for the attorney general than Ayuso’s couple, however, understands that there is no “doubt” that García Ortiz is considered “any member of the Fiscal Ministry”. And he believes that he must be stolen from his precautionary suspension because that decision “cannot delegate” to other prosecutors. The Lieutenant Prosecutor of the Supreme, number two in the agency, “is not impartial” according to this association and is not the chief inspection prosecutor.
PP resignation requests
Hurtado made several clear things when he rejected the first request of the accusations of cautiously suspending the attorney general. The process had to follow the channels of the Internal Regulations of the Fiscal Ministry, not any other supplementary law of the Judiciary, and García Ortiz’s possible influence on his subordinates is also not a reason to separate him from his position. And he is not the one: “It does not correspond to this instructor to agree on the interested precautionary suspension,” he said then.
The judge’s movement to ask the parties after the request of APIF has made the alarms jump in the Prosecutor’s Office. Last November, the judge rejected the first suspension request without transferring the parties – although the State Advocacy presented allegations without being asked – and now, however, Hurtado has communicated the request for APIF to accusations and defenses to inform their position in three days. The decision, therefore, could arrive throughout the month of August, before the opening ceremony of the judicial year in September.
The Movement in the Supreme Court also arrives in full offensive of the Popular Party so that Álvaro García Ortiz resigns. A requirement that those of Alberto Núñez Feijóo have been doing for more than a year for the cause of fiscal fraud against González Amador, but also for the position of the prosecution about the amnesty or the annulment of the rise of Dolores Delgado. That García Ortiz is outside the Attorney General’s Office constitutes, for some time, a priority of the opposition that the conservative association of prosecutors has also promoted in the Fiscal Council.
The case against García Ortiz, already without the provincial prosecutor of Madrid on the bench, is, therefore, only waiting for Hurtado, once the request for precautionary suspension, opens an oral trial against him and the Supreme Court puts the dated trial date. Both the Prosecutor’s Office and the State Advocacy have requested that it be exonerated while the accusations, plagued by parties and groups of extreme right, but headed by Alberto González Amador, have requested sentences that range between four and six years in jail for him.
Source: www.eldiario.es
