The "indomitable" lawyer who is a headache for Zapatero (and already was for Felipe González)

MadridThe defense strategy of businessman Julio Martínez Martínez has become a new headache for José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The friend and alleged frontman of the former Spanish government president has put it into practice this week, advised by lawyer María Dolores Márquez de Prado. It is with whom he was accompanied this Tuesday when he appeared as an investigated party at the National Court, a scenario that Márquez de Prado knows very well. This renowned criminal lawyer worked as a prosecutor there for seventeen years. A period in which she earned the nickname "indomitable." Precisely for being a headache for another former socialist leader, former Spanish president Felipe González during his time in Moncloa.

In the nineties, Márquez de Prado and three other prosecutors from the National Court (Eduardo Fungairiño, Ignacio Gordillo, and Pedro Rubira) rose to fame under the title of "indomitable prosecutors" for openly rebelling against decisions of their superiors. Márquez de Prado and the rest of the group became visible faces in the judicial fight against terrorism, both ETA's and that launched by the State with the GAL, and occupied media space for disobeying instructions from the public prosecutor's office or withholding information from judges. Márquez even ended up having a disciplinary proceeding opened against her, although it came to nothing and in 1999 she moved to the Prosecutor's Office of the Supreme Court.

She has not been a prosecutor since 2007 and now has a law firm together with her husband, who was also not exempt from controversy: he is the former magistrate of the National Court and former member of the General Council of the Judiciary Javier Gómez de Liaño, who was convicted of prevarication for the prosecution of the Prisa group's leadership and pardoned by the government of José María Aznar. The lawyer couple defended, at the same time, from 2013 to 2015, he Luis Bárcenas and she his wife, Rosalía Iglesias. The defense strategy of the former PP treasurer at that time was to collaborate with justice to the detriment of the Popular Party. It is precisely the one that Márquez de Prado is now following with Julio Martínez Martínez in the case that, this time, affects the PSOE.