The lawyer who interrogated Felipe González and has fallen out with José Luis Ábalos
Veteran criminal lawyer José Aníbal Álvarez had to accompany the former minister to the Supreme Court this week, even though the latter had resigned from his services.
Madrid"What do you want me to do? We have to defend him until the last minute." That was how lawyer José Aníbal Álvarez responded to his colleagues in the awkward scene that unfolded this Wednesday at the Supreme Court. Despite being José Luis Ábalos's lawyer, the rift between them was evident. Two days earlier, the former Minister of Transport had informed the high court that he was resigning from Aníbal Álvarez's services due to "irreconcilable differences." However, the investigating judge in the alleged corruption case, Leopoldo Puente, considered the last-minute resignation a maneuver by the suspect to avoid testifying and rejected it. Thus, the lawyer was forced to appear before the Supreme Court even though all ties with his client were broken.
It was a clear demonstration that they entered the high court separately and left at different times and in different vehicles. "He can't stand lies, especially on a personal level, and with the type of clients he has, it can be a real turnoff because it's difficult to align them with these values," reflects a source very close to Aníbal Álvarez, consulted by this newspaper. The now former lawyer of Ábalos, a 70-year-old Madrid native and veteran criminal lawyer, specializes in financial crimes and corruption. He was the lawyer for the mastermind behind one of the largest urban planning corruption schemes in the country, such as the Malaya case in Marbella, which implicated singer Isabel Pantoja. However, the case that has made him most famous in the media is related to the GAL (Spanish National Police).
Aníbal Álvarez defended several National Police commissioners involved in the state's dirty war against ETA and managed to get former Socialist President Felipe González to testify as a witness in the 1998 trial for the kidnapping of Segundo Marey, a French citizen, who had been with an ETA member. "He's a classic lawyer. Very loyal. From a generation that highly values honor, word, and manners," the same source emphasizes, stating that he is "highly respected" by judges and prosecutors. Puente came to his defense in the ruling rejecting Ábalos's claims. "He has carried out his work in an objectively irreproachable manner," said the judge.
Awarded several times for his professional practice, he is someone who "lives for the law and for the law firm" he founded—Anibal & De Pablos. His team predicts that he will practice "until his death," following in the footsteps of his mentor, the lawyer José María Stampa Braun, considered a leading figure in Spanish criminal law.
