The open wound that has been left in the prosecutor’s leadership has been evident in the first session of the trial, where there has been an exchange of versions and reproaches between several representatives of the public ministry. On the one hand, the senior prosecutor of Madrid, Almudena Lastra, who has assured that she suspected the attorney general from the beginning as the author of the leak of the email linked to businessman Alberto González Amador, partner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso and prosecuted for tax fraud, although she has not explained the reason for this suspicion. His story has been questioned by the provincial chief prosecutor, Pilar Rodríguez, and by the lieutenant prosecutor of the Technical Secretariat of the Attorney General’s Office, Diego Villafañe, who have supported García Ortiz’s actions.
Lastra’s statement was one of the most anticipated of the trial because, since the investigation began, it has put the focus on the attorney general. As she already did during her statement in the investigation phase, the senior prosecutor of Madrid has assured that on the night of March 13, 2024, after The World published that the Prosecutor’s Office was looking for an agreement with González Amador’s lawyer, she agreed with García Ortiz that a press release had to be published to deny this version and say that it was the lawyer who was looking for the agreement. But, according to Lastra, there was no rush to clarify this, so he ordered the provincial chief prosecutor and her press chief not to do anything until the next day.
However, the attorney general urged Pilar Rodríguez to collect the emails exchanged between González Amador’s lawyer and the prosecutor who had handled his case, Julián Salto, in order to begin preparing the press release as soon as possible. And, complying with that order, the provincial chief prosecutor asked Salto for the mails and he forwarded them to Lastra and García Ortiz, a decision that Lastra, according to his version, reproached him for: “Why did you send them to them? Pilar, they are going to leak them.” Asked about this statement, the provincial prosecutor has assured that her boss never gave her such a warning.
The senior prosecutor has deepened her suspicion by reporting that on the morning of March 14, she herself asked García Ortiz if González Amador had leaked, to which the attorney general, according to Lastra, replied: “That doesn’t matter now.” “It stuck in my soul,” Lastra said.
Lastra’s confrontation with Rodríguez and García Ortiz has also been revealed in his story about the statement released by the Prosecutor’s Office on the morning of March 14 to dismantle the false version of Ayuso’s entourage. That note, which gave an account of the steps that the Prosecutor’s Office had taken until denouncing González Amador, was at the origin of the case against the attorney general because, supposedly, it revealed confidential information about the businessman, a point that the Supreme Court later questioned. “I did not see the need to give so much detail. In my opinion there was no reason to say whether or not he had recognized the facts. It was only necessary to have explained that it was a conformity like so many others, not to reveal the defense strategy of the investigated person,” Lastra said.
For their part, both Villafañe, García Ortiz’s right-hand man, and the provincial chief prosecutor, have questioned the decision of the senior prosecutor not to publicly report the investigation opened against the Madrid president’s partner, which was only known when it was published by the press on March 12, 2024, a week after the Madrid prosecutor’s office filed the complaint. Both prosecutors have pointed out that this decision contrasts with the actions of the Madrid prosecutor’s office in other complaints of tax fraud against people of media relevance, regarding the department led by Lastra that has given publicity even before the complaint was formalized.
During her statement, the senior prosecutor admitted that she knew that the process opened against González Amador’s lawyer could end in an agreement in accordance with the Prosecutor’s Office on March 12, 2024, one day before that negotiation and the email that is the focus of the investigation were leaked. It was in a meeting in which the senior prosecutor, the provincial chief and prosecutor Salto met, who, in an informal conversation, summarized the conversations he had had with the lawyer and told them that, probably, the matter would end in an agreement. This point has also been confirmed by prosecutor Salto, who, during his statement, described as a “legal order” the request by the attorney general to send him all the emails he had exchanged with Carlos Neira, González Amador’s tax lawyer, including the mail that focuses the investigation.
Salto has said that on March 7, 2024, his bosses demanded all the information about the González Amador case, after a journalist had called the Attorney General’s Office to request information regarding a complaint filed against the company Maxwell Cremona. The prosecutor has admitted that it caught his attention because it did not seem like a “very serious” matter but rather “another crime of tax fraud.” He sent the documentation about the case to the dean of the economic crimes prosecutor’s office and, when the next day he asked why the interest in that case was due, he was told that the person being investigated was the partner of the president of the Community of Madrid.
The accusations have attempted to question the decision of the Attorney General’s Office to activate an accounting for the case of Ayuso’s partner, a procedure provided for in article 25 of the Organic Statute of the Public Prosecutor’s Office by which prosecutors are obliged to inform their superiors of matters of special relevance. The person who launched this procedure was the prosecutor Villafañe, who has stressed that last year he activated 215 depositions of accounts (“more than one for each working day”) and that on March 8, 2024, just one day after demanding from the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office all the information about the procedure against González Amador, he did the same in the case of Begoña Gómez, the wife of the President of the Government. “The animosity of the top prosecutor of Madrid towards the current attorney general of the State, towards the previous one [la también exministra de Justicia Dolores Delgado] and to many prosecutors who assume positions in the Attorney General’s Office, it is evident,” said Villafañe, who has accused Lastra of making “unfounded criticism” against them “in any public forum.”
