Supreme Court Judge Requests Call Records of Attorney General Amid Fraud Case Inquiry
A judge from Spain's Supreme Court is seeking to uncover the communication records of the Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, during critical days linked to a tax fraud case involving the partner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the President of the Community of Madrid. The investigating magistrate has approached telecommunications companies to obtain call logs for the period between March 8 and March 14, which includes significant media coverage related to the case.
In addition to call records, the judge has requested information on the data packets exchanged during this timeframe, identifying individuals the Attorney General communicated with. Furthermore, the judge is inquiring whether the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard can retrieve WhatsApp messages that García Ortiz deleted when he switched mobile devices a week after the investigation commenced.
The inquiry centers on whether the Attorney General or the provincial prosecutor of Madrid played a role in leaking an email to the press. This email contained admissions of a 350,000-euro tax fraud by Alberto González Amador, Ayuso's partner, and proposed a plea deal to avoid imprisonment. Following the initiation of the case in October, the judge secured a court order to search the offices of the implicated parties and collect relevant messages and emails from March of the previous year.
Despite these efforts, the Civil Guard was unable to recover any text messages from García Ortiz's mobile devices. They found only a handful of emails, with just one pertaining to González Amador's case and lacking any information on the alleged leak. A subsequent report indicated the reason for the lack of data: the Attorney General changed his phone shortly after the Supreme Court's investigation began, a move the Attorney General's office attributes to standard data protection practices.
In response to the absence of evidence, the judge has initiated further actions to attempt to recover the missing data that the Civil Guard could not secure during its October search. This includes reaching out to two telecommunications providers for the requested call records and data packets from March 8 to March 14, which coincides with the period when pivotal details about González Amador's case surfaced in the media.
Moreover, the judge has followed up with the Central Operational Unit to explore potential avenues for recovering the messages from García Ortiz's two mobile phones that were not located during the earlier investigation. The magistrate references a 2018 ruling by the Supreme Court concerning a drug trafficking organization that successfully transported large quantities of hashish into Catalonia as a legal basis for the inquiry.
