Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff, has defended in the Supreme Court trial the hoax he spread about the confession of the Madrid president’s partner: “It is a logical deduction, if the Public Prosecutor’s Office is a hierarchical body, a prosecutor cannot make a decision without permission from above,” he said. “The agreement has not been concluded, therefore I come to the logical conclusion that they have stopped it from above. Who is going to stop it, from below?” he said before the astonished gaze of the lieutenant prosecutor of the Supreme Court.
“I don’t have any source, it is a message without support from any source, I am a journalist, I am not a notary who needs a certificate,” he said later when the State Attorney’s Office asked about the tweets in which he developed that hoax.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s right-hand man has thus defended that on the night of March 13, 2024, she spread among dozens of journalists a false version of the tax fraud case: that the Prosecutor’s Office had stopped a possible pact with González Amador by order of the organization’s leadership. “The deduction is logical,” he said while explaining to the prosecutor that the Prosecutor’s Office is a “hierarchical body.” He has denied being the source of the first El Mundo news story that night, although he has acknowledged that he put González Amador in contact with a journalist from that outlet.
“I think about it and with more reason every day,” he has come to say when the State Attorney’s Office has exhibited with its messages from those days in March in which it spread, without evidence, its “deductions” about the Prosecutor’s Office and the case of tax fraud. “That’s what I keep saying: everything is murky and ugly.” “An injustice is being committed against a Spaniard,” he added later.
Rodríguez has spread a new hoax in the Supreme Court about the case against González Amador: “He is a Spaniard who wanted to reach an agreement with the Treasury and the Treasury has not allowed him to reach that agreement.” The Tax Agency investigated him and prevented him from settling the matter with a late payment because the amount allegedly defrauded exceeded the thresholds of a tax crime and necessarily had to end up in the hands of a judge.
The communicator has revealed that he met the businessman, whom he had saved as “Alberto Quirón” on his phone, before Ayuso herself did. “He tells me that he has this inspection, I told him to trust the inspectors and the Prosecutor’s Office, they are serious people and would never leak anything. He tells me that he does not want to take it to court because of the president’s reputation, he wanted to reach an agreement so that no dust would arise,” he said in line with what he already declared in the investigation phase.
Ayuso’s chief of staff has reiterated that it was the businessman himself who sent him the email from prosecutor Salto a few hours after elDiario.es exclusively revealed his case of tax fraud: “At 9 o’clock he sends me the photograph of the email that Mr. Salto sends to the lawyer and it is said that they are willing to reach an agreement. I keep that email and I will use it many hours later to deny a news story from La Sexta.” “At seven in the afternoon I won’t reveal anything,” he said about the messages he sent to journalists at that time on March 13, 2024, long before the first news of the case was published.
“El Mundo publishes that the Prosecutor’s Office proposes an agreement, La Sexta says that it is the other way around and I give a group of journalists what the Prosecutor’s Office had said: we can reach an agreement. In that email a previous email is not cited and I was unaware of the previous email and from there the madness that brings us here is unleashed,” he added.
The lies and threats to elDiario.es
Miguel Ángel Rodríguez was untruthful in the investigation phase when, before Judge Hurtado, he said that no journalist from elDiario.es contacted him before this newspaper revealed González Amador’s tax fraud case on March 12. “I had a confusion,” he said, now justifying that he thought the journalist was from another media outlet. “It has a leftist editorial line, I am not going to expect applause.”
The State Attorney’s Office has shown him that this was not how it happened, given that the journalist from elDiario.es who wrote to him identified himself by name and surname, also explaining which newspaper he worked for. “I have too many things to do to attend to a left-wing person, who also tends to be very aggressive,” he added before describing as “hodgepodge” and “scandalous” the first exclusive of the case that, to this day, they have not denied.
He has also tried to downplay his threats to this newspaper when, in writing, he stated to Esther Palomera: “We are going to crush you, you are going to have to close.” It was, he says now, an “improper conversation” with someone with whom he claims to have “trust.”
The “orders from above” of the Prosecutor’s Office
Rodríguez arrived at the Supreme Court a few minutes after three ten in the afternoon accompanied by two people and without making any statements to the media. His testimony comes after several witnesses have indicated when their hoaxes about the case of Ayuso’s partner began to circulate: around seven in the afternoon on March 13, 2024, several hours before what he acknowledged when he testified before Judge Ángel Hurtado during the investigation. This was stated this Tuesday by the press chiefs of the Attorney General’s Office and the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office and was also confirmed yesterday by Almudena Lastra, Madrid’s chief prosecutor.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff was the first to circulate the hoax that triggered the search for information in the Prosecutor’s Office about the case: that the Public Ministry had offered him a silent agreement for his tax fraud case, but that it had been stopped by “orders from above.” During the investigation, he explained that this was not information but opinion and that the information he manipulated came from an email that González Amador himself sent him on the morning of March 12, a few hours after elDiario.es revealed the case exclusively.
According to the version he offered in the investigation, Ayuso’s chief of staff had an email from prosecutor Julián Salto since that morning but did “nothing” until “38 hours later”, when El Mundo and La Sexta published several contradictory information about those pacts and he wanted to defend the false option to benefit the public image of his boss’s partner. The various testimonies reveal that these hoax messages began hours before any media outlet alluded to the emails.
Source: www.eldiario.es
