Judge María Lourdes Platero Parada will judge the alleged tax fraud of businessman Alberto González Amador, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner, according to EL PAÍS from two sources close to the case. The procedure has fallen by random allocation to this judge who heads Criminal Court 19, located on Julián Camarillo street, east of the capital, the place where a trial will be held whose outcome could mark the career of the Madrid president.
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The date of the trial is still unknown, according to a judicial source. It was feared that the oral hearing could be delayed until well into 2027 due to the backlog that criminal courts have been dragging since the pandemic, but this source specifies that Court 19 is quite clear. This opens the possibility that the sentence will arrive before the regional elections in May next year in which Ayuso is playing to maintain her absolute majority.
Judge Platero, 59 years old, came to the criminal courts of Madrid from the investigative court 4 of the municipality of Fuenlabrada, in the south of the Madrid region, where she had held her position since 2019. She made news in 2022 for opening an investigation against the former socialist mayor of Fuenlabrada Manuel Robles, denounced by Vox for having granted a subsidy of 26,000 euros to a local body of the Castro regime, the Municipal Assembly El Poder Popular de la Habana del Este, which allegedly had not justified the use of the money. Later the judge dismissed it after carrying out some tests, according to sources from the City Council, which is still controlled by the PSOE. “We saw nothing strange in his behavior,” these sources say.
The news about who will judge Amador comes two years after the start of the judicial investigation. The investigation began in March 2024 and concluded last September, when a judge from Plaza de Castilla sent Amador to trial by accepting the prosecution’s requests to try him for four crimes: the two that had led the investigation (tax fraud and forgery in commercial documents) and two others requested by the popular accusations of PSOE and Más Madrid (continued accounting crime and belonging to a criminal organization).
What will be judged is whether Amador used 15 false invoices to defraud the Treasury of 350,910 euros in corporate tax for 2020 and 2021 filed by his quality seal consultancy, Maxwell Cremona SL. The four people who issued the invoices will also be judged: the Mexican Maximiliano Niederer and three friends from the Sevillian town of Arahal, David Herrera Lobato and the brothers Agustín and José Miguel Carrillo Saborido.
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The Public Prosecutor’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office have requested three years and nine months in prison for Amador. It is not unlikely that Ayuso’s partner will negotiate with these two state bodies a plea agreement through which they would obtain a reduction of the sentence in exchange for avoiding imprisonment. That agreement could come up to the last minute. If it happens, the trial would be reduced to a mere ratification of the agreement before the judge. If there is no agreement, Amador would have to persuade the judge at the risk of ending up with a higher sentence, with possible imprisonment.
Ayuso’s partner has tried to reach an agreement at different stages of the case ― it was his initial strategy, expressed in the famous email from his lawyer to the Public Prosecutor’s Office that led to the conviction of the Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz ―. However, the latest that has emerged, two months ago, is that he plans to request the nullity of the case based on that conviction. He anticipated that intention in the mandatory preparatory defense brief for the trial that he sent to the investigating judge. He considers that as a preliminary issue to the practice of evidence the judge should consider that the leak of the email violated his rights. However, the Supreme Court already said in its ruling against García Ortiz that this path should be considered closed because a professional judge must know that this email cannot be considered evidence of guilt.
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