This Monday has been a hectic day for the general secretary of the Madrid socialists, Juan Lobato. The news published this Sunday by the newspaper ‘ABC’ ensuring that the PSOE spokesperson in the Madrid Assembly took a WhatsApp conversation with a Moncloa advisor to a notary to “certify” that the PSOE did not leak the email in which the lawyers of Alberto González Amador, boyfriend of Isabel Diaz Ayusonegotiated an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office for his alleged tax fraud has shaken the political news.
This communication is the core of the case being followed by the Supreme Court (TS) against the Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García Ortiz, and Lobato has worked hard to offer explanations of what happened both at the time of the public dissemination of the email, last March, and when he went to the notary’s office, months later, when the accusation of García Ortiz occurs. Both events have already had their first consequence in court, because Lobato has been summoned as a witness by the TS magistrate that investigates the alleged revelation of secrets.
The socialist leader has insisted that on Thursday, March 14, Pilar Sánchez Acera, then chief of staff of the now minister Óscar López who in turn was chief of staff of the president Pedro Sanchezhe messaged him and sent him the email at the center of the judicial investigation first thing in the morning: a communication that denied that the Prosecutor’s Office had tried to reach an agreement with González Amador and that it had been his defense that had initiated a procedure that is common in the judicial sphere. This confidential document, Lobato has maintained, was sent to him by the PSOE-M Secretary of Institutional Policy in order to that he could use it against Díaz Ayuso in the control session in the Assembly that was going to take place a few hours later. In the conversation, he insisted, he asks where it came from and receives the response that several media outlets were already publishing it and that they had obtained it from those publications.
Lobato has indicated that he precisely went to a notary to prove this point. He did it, according to his explanations, when the Supreme Court opened a case against the attorney general, because It was “very clear” that in this process he was going to be summoned to testify since in those days he becomes the person “who speaks the most in all of Spain on this matter.”
The socialist spokesperson has assured that He went to the notary without being advised by anyone and without passing it on to anyone. of the PSOE leadership neither before nor after. “I went by my own decision,” he stated, adding that he sought to “have insurance” that would guarantee that if they “accused” the PSOE-M that the information had reached them through the Prosecutor’s Office, it would be “clearly proven” that there had not been any. This was the case and that both Sánchez Acera and him had received the email “via the media.”
Asked by journalists why he did not publish the conversation with the then advisor to the Presidency of the Government of the Nation to clear up any doubts, Lobato has argued that it is not an issue that depends only on him because it is a conversation between two people. “I have not discussed it with her,” he said, referring to Pilar Sánchez Acera, to give his opinion in any case that he considers that the publication would not be “the usefulness” of that conversation.
“I would do it again today and a hundred times,” Lobato has remarked in any case about his visit to the notary, an instance on which he has put the focus of the public dissemination of his visit and against which he has announced actions because he considers that it is not has conformed to his “duty of stealth.” “First we will demand that they investigate what happened and then there is the claim through judicial meanswhich logically we will start it,” he added.
Citation in the Supreme Court
Lobato’s decision to go to a notary has shaken Madrid and national politics. And the leak of the conversations between González Amador’s defense and the public ministry is the core of the matter both judicially and politically speaking: hours after the publication of the news, the general secretary of the PSOE-M He has been summoned to testify in the Supreme Court this Friday -the same day that the federal congress of the PSOE begins in Seville- and the PP is already demanding responsibilities, especially from the central government, for these events.
“They have orchestrated a case from the president of the Government’s table to try to destroy a political rival through her boyfriend,” the Madrid president said from South Koreawhere he is on an official trip, in statements sent to the media by his team. “The use of any personal data to harm a political opponent is dirty and inappropriate for a democracy,” he later added in an interview in Cope.