Álvaro García Ortiz declared as a defendant for almost an hour and a half before Judge Ángel Hurtado in the Supreme Court. An appearance in which he only answered the questions of the State Attorneys and in which he was clear in denying that he leaked Alberto González Amador’s confession to the press: “Absolutely not,” he said when asked directly. An appearance in which he accused Miguel Ángel Rodríguez of disseminating “obviously false” information about the case and in which he explained that all the prosecutors agreed to issue a press release, which triggered this judicial case: “What we have to do is deny.”
“I believe that lying can never be a secret.” In his first intervention, the attorney general announced his main line of defense: that González Amador himself and his entourage, led by Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff, were the first to break the confidentiality of his lawyer’s negotiations with the Prosecutor’s Office in a case of tax fraud. And that he acted, through an accounting, to obtain information about the case and deny the “obviously false” information, not to harm the businessman.
“Mr. González Amador is a citizen like everyone else, with the fullness of his legal and constitutional rights,” said the attorney general. On the night of March 13 of last year, when according to Hurtado the attorney general leaked that confession to the media, he limited himself to collecting information to deny hoaxes: “A lie is being extracted, the prosecutor never offered a first-party agreement to the investigated.”
He also developed his other great line of defense in addition to the lack of evidence and the previous breach of confidentiality: that by the time he obtained all the information the media already had and were publishing its content. “While I am still reading that email, the press officer informs me that there is a media outlet, La Sexta, that at 10:10 p.m. says that the information from El Mundo is not true.”
García Ortiz also dedicated part of his statement to justify deleting the messages from his mobile phone once the case was opened, framing it as a common security and data protection measure. “I delete everything, absolutely everything, on an absolutely regular basis.”
The chief prosecutor of Madrid: “I told him: Álvaro, have you leaked the note?”
Almudena Lastra, Madrid’s chief prosecutor, became one of the most useful witnesses for the accusations. She confirmed that from the beginning all the prosecutors involved agreed that it was necessary to deny the hoaxes in the case, but she considered that the form sought by the attorney general was not the correct one. He claims that he even asked him if he had leaked that email the night before.
Source: www.eldiario.es
