Álvaro García Ortiz remains Attorney General of the State. This was confirmed this afternoon by government sources who report that the appointment will be approved in the Council of Ministers next Tuesday, November 28th. These sources emphasize that García Ortiz is a career prosecutor of “recognized prestige” and has held the position of attorney general since last year.
The Attorney General is currently in office as his mandate decreases with the change of government. The decision of the Supreme Court to annul the promotion granted by García Ortiz to his predecessor, Dolores Delgado, so that she could reach the highest category of the career as a prosecutor, has put the focus in recent hours on her figure and on the possibility that she will leave the office was not renewed, but the government decided that he should continue in office. The appointment will not be approved for another week, but the executive branch’s confirmation of the decision resolves pressure from some areas of the prosecutor’s office to fire him. The PP had also called for his resignation this Tuesday after the Supreme Court ruled that Delgado’s promotion to court prosecutor was a “diversion of power”.
The Attorney General’s mandate lasts four years and ends when the government does so. So the extension now announced theoretically runs until 2027, but in reality García Ortiz’s mandate is linked to that of the executive and ends at that point. That’s what it does. Do this here. The Statute of the Public Prosecutor’s Office stipulates that the office of Prosecutor General cannot be extended from one government to another. However, there is one exception: if the holder has held the office for less than two years. Since García Ortiz has only been in office for less than a year and a half, the government can now extend him for another full term.
García Ortiz – who belonged to the Progressive Union of Prosecutors (UPF) until his appointment as head of the public prosecutor’s office – was appointed prosecutor general in July 2022 after Delgado resigned for health reasons. Until then, he had been her right-hand man as head of the Technical Secretariat, acting as one of the then attorney general’s main defenders and mediators inside and outside the race. Through his succession, García Ortiz inherited not only the office, but also the very strong internal resistance that Delgado received from the most conservative parts of the Prosecutor’s Office and from the opposition of the PP and Vox, who never considered her suitable to become Attorney General due to her position as Minister of Justice during the first government of Pedro Sánchez. These internal tensions have increased and the renewal announced this afternoon comes at a time of maximum confrontation between the Attorney General’s Office and the most critical wing of the race, largely due to the proposal for an amnesty law and the ruling of the Supreme Court that annuls Delgado’s promotion .
A part of this sector accuses García Ortiz of not having defended them for the attacks on the career of the prosecutor, which, according to them, includes the agreement signed between PSOE and Junts on the investiture of Pedro Sánchez. This Tuesday, 19 prosecutors from the Criminal Section of the Supreme Court sent him a letter in which they accused him of having “deliberately ignored” the request for protection formulated by the trial prosecutors against the “harmful insinuations” of the litigation contained in the pact signed by the two Play. A few hours before the dissemination of this letter, the Disputes Chamber of the Supreme Court had annulled the promotion of Delgado to the highest career category decided by García Ortiz in September 2022. The verdict, delivered unanimously by five judges of different sensibilities, is very critical of the actions of the Attorney General, who, according to the judges, assigned this position to his predecessor to ensure her promotion without taking into account the merit criteria that govern these appointments . “Whatever the opinion of each individual, the truth is that this automatic promotion is neither intended by the legislature nor provided for in the law. And of course, the power of the Attorney General of the State to make the proposed decision on competitions for positions in the first category is not aimed at rewriting the rules of promotion in the tax career and adapting them to his personal preferences,” the Supreme Court emphasizes. .
If the extension takes effect, García Ortiz will have to decide how the sentence will be carried out. Tax sources tend to believe that the Supreme Court’s decision has no impact on Delgado’s current position as head of the Democratic Memory prosecutor’s office, but legal sources indicate that it does. It is the third time that the Supreme Court annulled an appointment during the García Ortiz era, although in the previous case, that of juvenile prosecutor Eduardo Esteban, whose appointment the court annulled twice, the appointment was still made under Delgado’s mandate. The Supreme Court must also rule on the appeals filed against Delgado’s appointment to the position he now holds. This appointment led to a heated confrontation between García Ortiz and the Association of Prosecutors, which is in the majority of the race and has a conservative bias.
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García Ortiz was born in Lumbrales (Salamanca) in 1967 and his life has always been closely linked to Galicia, where he worked until Delgado called him to head the technical secretariat of the Attorney General’s Office. His name came to the front lines of the country when he took on the “Prestige” case, which involved the oil tanker that sank off the coast of Galicia in 2002, causing one of the biggest environmental disasters in Spanish history. “It is a miracle that the prestige trial is taking place,” he said in an interview in EL PAÍS as the final phase of this oral hearing approached in 2013.
In March 2018, he received the most votes in elections to the Finance Council – the attorney general’s main advisory body – which was considered a milestone because of the lower weight of progressive prosecutors in the race. She received almost 900 endorsements after touring the Spanish prosecutor’s office in a campaign that also included Delgado herself and her predecessor in the attorney general’s office, María José Segarra, as candidates. Both were elected to the Finance Council, but had fewer votes than the current head of the State Ministry
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