After the media din of two weeks of trial, silence. Álvaro García Ortiz is already awaiting sentencing. And everything indicates that it will not be a long wait, like those trains that never finish entering the station. In a trial for the revelation of secrets, for an alleged leak after all, secrecy prevails – what a greater paradox that the ruling of the court judging a leak ends up being leaked. Not even the date, even if it is only an approximation. “There are no deadlines,” is heard with extreme caution in the Plaza de las Salesas. But what is foreseeable (that umbrella under which we journalists usually protect ourselves to prevent the downpour of reality from overcoming us) is that the ruling will be made public before the end of the year. Even before November expires, the most optimistic point out.
“It will depend on whether there is unanimity or not,” point out the sources consulted (It seems complicated, a priori, for it to be a seamless resolution). “And if there is a change of speaker,” they add to further confuse the forecast. And if the magistrate in charge of writing the sentence, Susana Polo, presented an acquittal, an assumption, for the consideration of her colleagues, and the majority of the court did not support it, the president of the Chamber, Andrés Martínez Arrieta, would have to appoint another speaker to be in charge of expressing the majority sentiment in black and white.
«They have to resolve all the previous issues. It is not going to be a ten-page sentence. “It will be extensive,” legal sources point out. “They have to think about it very well,” they point out, adding more uncertainty to the prediction about when, because even more dark clouds are hanging over what, if possible. Another note, namely: if there is a sentence in November “it means that the court really wants to acquit him” (so once the decision has been made to exempt him from any criminal responsibility for the leak of the confession of Ayuso’s boyfriend, the now famous email of February 2 of last year – they reason – the court would avoid prolonging García Ortiz’s uncertainty, and even more so in the case of a high State institution).
Disqualification penalties
But, in any case, and beyond giving a complete response to the complaints of alleged violations of fundamental rights by the attorney general’s defense – which in any case will be asserted before the Constitutional Court in the more than foreseeable appeals for protection in case of conviction–, the seven magistrates who have García Ortiz’s professional future in their hands must not only decide whether or not he committed a crime of revealing secrets, on which the entire trial has pivoted during its six sessions. And the fact is that the attorney general can also be convicted, with the procedural law in hand, for any of the other two crimes that some accusations also accuse him of, and that they maintained in their final qualifications: prevarication and infidelity in the custody of documents.
Two accusations, Fundación Foro Libertad y Alternativa and the Professional and Independent Association of Prosecutors (APIF), also attribute to García Ortiz a crime of prevarication, although with non-coinciding approaches, while Clean Hands proposes as an alternative, in the event that the court does not see sufficient evidence to convict him for revealing secrets, that he be convicted of infidelity in the custody of documents. None of these crimes carry prison sentences, but they do carry disqualification, which if imposed would remove the attorney general from office.
Accusations of prevarication
And if García Ortiz is finally disqualified, it would be in the hands of the Government of Pedro Sánchez and a possible pardon or of the Constitutional Court chaired by Cándido Conde-Pumpido, which has already amended the plan of the Supreme Court by annulling the sentences for the million-dollar fraud of the ERE, among others those of the former socialist presidents of Andalusia José Antonio Griñán and Manuel Chaves.
For APIF – which demands the highest penalty for the attorney general: six years in prison and twelve years of disqualification – the prevarication (the adoption of an arbitrary resolution knowing its injustice) lies in the “verbal order” from García Ortiz to the prosecutor Julián Salto – in charge of the tax fraud investigation against González Amador – through the provincial chief prosecutor Pilar Rodríguez to “seize data” that he did not have. Namely, the emails exchanged with the defense of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s boyfriend to try to close a conformity agreement.
An order that for the defense of the accused is a mandatory presentation of accounts protected by his prerogatives as the highest representative of the Prosecutor’s Office, but that the APIF lawyer, Juan Antonio Frago, considers in his indictment “manifestly illegal” with “manifest contempt for all administrative channels or procedures”, and also issued “taking advantage” of his hierarchical superiority.
Two facts “that have not been discussed”
Prosecution sources highlight in this regard two facts “that have not been discussed.” On the one hand, “access to mail by the attorney general”something that they emphasize “disempowers the secret.” And on the other hand, that the press release that on March 14, the day after the alleged leak, X-rayed the contacts between prosecutor Salto and González Amador’s lawyer, “is a matter of the attorney general,” who explained that he himself was in charge of participating in its writing together with his press manager to deny the hoax that the agreement of conformity had come from the prosecutor, and not the other way around, as really happened.
For his part, the lawyer of Freedom and Alternative ForumFernando García Capelo – who requests a sentence of four years in prison and three years of suspension from office –, supports the prevarication in the fact that the attorney general requested that the emails between Salto and Carlos Neira, lawyer of Ayuso’s partner, be sent to a personal email address, and not to the corporate one, thus leaving an open door – he maintains – to erase the trace of those communications (as he actually did, as he revealed in the trial, when he was forced to change emails to the having had their address leaked and receiving threats).
But even within the accusations there are discrepancies regarding a possible prevarication, since neither the private accusation that represents González Amador as injured nor the Madrid Bar Association and Manos Limpies, both popular accusations, have accused him of this crime. “I see a conviction for prevarication as impossible,” legal sources point out in this regard.
Document Custodian
The third and last crime for which García Ortiz has been accused – and on whose alleged commission the Supreme Court must also rule in its sentence – is that of infidelity in document custodys, punished in article 415 of the Penal Code with penalties of fines and special disqualification from holding office for between one and three years. In the target of criminal reproach, the authority or public official who “knowingly and without due authorization” accesses or allows access “to secret documents whose custody is entrusted to him by reason of his position.”
Only Clean Handsand in a subsidiary manner (in the event that the court rules out the revelation of secrets), supports this accusation, which is based on an unavoidable premise, which in its case must be determined by the Chamber: that the attorney general of the State was the custodian of a secret document which ended up being leaked on the night of March 13 of last year (although the court did not reach the conviction that it was he who leaked the email).
For this crime, which also does not carry a prison sentence, the lawyer for Manos Médicas, Víctor Soriano, asks the Supreme Court to sentence García Ortiz to two years of disqualification and the payment of a fine of 108,000 euros (at a rate of 300 euros per day for nine months). However, the rest of the accusations do not support this alternative request for conviction, to the extent that they consider that this criminal behavior would be included in the revelation of secrets, which constitutes the main accusation faced by the attorney general.