Two complementary but inconclusive reports from the Civil Guard on the leak of the case of Ayuso’s boyfriend | Spain

One has 57 pages. The other, only two. The first is dated November 21. The second, last Thursday. The first analyzed the messages sent or received by email or instant messaging applications by the provincial chief prosecutor of Madrid, Pilar Rodríguez, between March 8 and 14. The second, those that contained the electronic devices of the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, on the same dates. They are two of the three reports that the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard has sent in the last month to Judge Ángel Hurtado in an attempt to advance the investigations into the alleged leak to the press of the email by which Alberto González Amador, partner of the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, proposed to the Prosecutor’s Office a pact of recognition of two tax crimes in exchange for a sentence that would allow him to avoid jail. Complementary, but not conclusive, both reports signed by the same two agents are the first pieces of a puzzle – still incomplete, and which leaves new questions when both documents are compared – in which, for now, there is no evidence of who leaked the email about González Amador, accused of fraud, to Cadena SER, the first media outlet to publish part of its content on the night of March 13.

Los whatsapps. Last Thursday’s report analyzing the contents of García Ortiz’s mobile phone reflects that the UCO did not find any communication. “0 messages belonging to any type of instant messaging application in the period analyzed,” the researchers reflected in the document. Then, sources close to the investigations explained to EL PAÍS that this fact was the result of the fact that the attorney general had changed his telephone number before the judge ordered the search of his office on October 30. Sources close to the Prosecutor’s Office justified that the previous terminal had been formatted – and thus its contents erased – in accordance with an instruction on data protection issued in 2019 and the guide disseminated by the data protection delegate of the Prosecutor’s Office. in 2022. These documents urge the “formatting of computer equipment once it is returned by its user”, to “not store documents indefinitely on digital media or in email accounts” and “delete them once they are no longer necessary, making sure that they do not remain residents in the trash.”

However, the absence of messages on García Ortiz’s cell phone has not prevented the summary from containing communications from the attorney general. The November report on the devices of the Madrid provincial chief prosecutor includes several of them that confirm that the highest representative of the public ministry exchanged messages with Rodríguez regarding the complaint of Ayuso’s boyfriend on those dates and times. The UCO document on the prosecutor’s phone includes, in fact, several screenshots of the whatsapps between her and the attorney general. In those messages there are several conversations from the night of March 13, the day the existence of the email sent by Ayuso’s boyfriend came to light. The Prosecutor’s Office decided to prepare a press release to deny the hoax that the Madrid president’s entourage had begun to spread then, with the thesis that it was the public ministry who had proposed this agreement.

The emails. In the backup copy of the desktop computer belonging to García Ortiz, the Civil Guard located two files that contained a copy of the same document, an email about the complaint filed by the Prosecutor’s Office against Maxwell Cremona, González Amador’s company. Both were sent on March 13 at 11:45 p.m.—that is, after the Cadena SER news was spread—to a Gmail email belonging to García Ortiz and came from the official account of the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office headquarters. They included the chain of emails between the lawyer of Ayuso’s partner and the economic crimes prosecutor, Julián Salto, as well as the complaint that he had filed in court the day before.

The UCO points out that this document had been previously sent to the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office – which had requested them to prepare the press release that denied the message leaked shortly before by Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez – and the prosecutor Rodríguez reported it. had immediately forwarded it to García Ortiz. The email included the complaint for two alleged crimes against the Public Treasury committed by the partner of the Madrid president. In the attorney general’s official email account, the Civil Guard found 45 emails sent or received between March 8 and 14, but the agents concluded that they were of “no interest for the investigation.”

The police document on Prosecutor Rodríguez’s devices contains more emails about the events investigated. Thus, it includes the existence of at least two emails that she sent to the attorney general that have not appeared in the subsequent analysis of his computers. The investigation has not yet determined whether they were deleted, never arrived at the destination address, or another incident occurred. The provincial head sent the first of these emails to the attorney general at 9:59 p.m. on March 13 and included the messages exchanged between the defense of Ayuso’s partner and the economic crimes prosecutor in charge of his investigation into the matter and pdf ” proposed criminal compliance crime against HP [Hacienda Pública]”. The second, which was also not found on the prosecutor’s computer, is from two minutes later under the subject “criminal compliance Maxwell Cremona matter”, in reference to González Amador’s company.

Between that moment and “until the leak is published at 11:51 p.m. [en la página web de la Cadena SER, aunque la noticia se había difundido en antena a las 23.24]there are only a very small number of people in whom two circumstances occur” and who supposedly could have leaked the document. Among them, he cites personnel from “the State Attorney General’s Office, the provincial chief prosecutor, the senior prosecutor, the senior prosecutor for economic crimes and the prosecutor for economic crimes,” the agents list. The Civil Guard concluded that, for all this, it appreciated a “preeminent participation” of the attorney general in the alleged leak.