The Prosecutor’s Office is going to try to stop Judge Juan Carlos Peinado, who has decided to open proceedings against the wife of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez. The public ministry announced yesterday that it was appealing directly to the Provincial Court of Madrid, the resolution of the instructor so that it is annulled and the complaint is filed.
The arguments of the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office are that the events described in the Manos Liminas complaint are not criminal and furthermore it does not provide any evidence other than journalistic information from various digital media. The main basis for requesting the shelving of such proceedings is the Supreme Court’s own jurisprudence, which since 2017 has been determining when a case should be opened.
The High Court has said it repeatedly. In 2017, a complaint against a senator was inadmissible because “despite the possible initial criminal appearance of the facts alleged in the complaint, no element or principle of evidence is offered in it that reasonably supports its reality.”
With this same argument, the Criminal Chamber of the High Court, with Manuel Marchena as rapporteur, inadmissible a complaint filed by Vox in 2018 against the then State Attorney General Dolores Delgado.
In 2021 the same thing happened again, but this time with several complaints from Izquierda Unida and other groups against the emeritus king Juan Carlos de Borbón, for his fortune abroad. On this occasion, the complainants were based on journalistic information, as well as on proceedings that the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office had open regarding the events.
In that resolution, the court highlighted that the complaints basically reproduce the content of press information, and argued that something more is needed to open a criminal case.
“In general, a piece of news by itself does not legitimize any popular actor to convert the journalistic story into a story of punishable events triggering criminal proceedings. The value judgments of those who intend to exercise popular action do not convert the news into a crime,” the Supreme Court then noted in a resolution.
With this jurisprudence, in addition to the guidelines of two circulars from the State Attorney General’s Office, from 2013 and 2022, the prosecutor in charge of the case understands that Peinado should not have agreed to open proceedings with a mere complaint from the Manos Liminas pseudo-union.
Furthermore, the prosecutor reproaches the head of the investigating court number 41 of Madrid for not even asking him for a report and for having found out through the media about the existence of such a matter.
Hands Cleans tried to pull the strings yesterday by warning in a statement that its text is limited to collecting journalistic information published about Begoña Gómez, but it will be up to the judge to determine its veracity, implicitly recognizing that it could be false.
The seven-page complaint, and based on these sources of information, accuses Gómez of the crime of influence peddling. According to the text, using her status as the wife of the President of the Government, she recommended by letter businessmen who had received public works tenders.
He gives the example of a businessman, Carlos Barrabés, who received 10 million in public funds. According to the complaint, the businessman set up a master’s degree in which the wife of the chief executive participated. Gómez’s letters of recommendation triggered, according to the complaint, the tenders to the businessmen, who had a friendly relationship.
Always based on journalistic news, it also links Gómez with Víctor de Aldama, one of the businessmen investigated in the Koldo case for having received million-dollar contracts from public companies linked to the Ministry of Transportation for the sale of masks in the middle of the pandemic.
Judge Juan Carlos Peinado has been quick to open proceedings and put his foot on the accelerator with the complaint filed by Clean Hands, an organization known for denouncing all types of facts without a specific interest and based on journalistic news.
In less than a week, the instructor received the complaint against Begoña Gómez and carried out the first steps. In the journalistic world he is known when he decided to charge around twenty editors for publishing information about the CDR.
With the Prosecutor’s Office against it, he finally filed it. It is not the first time that this magistrate has received a complaint from Clean Hands, he has already opened proceedings against two former councilors of Ahora Madrid for publishing offensive messages on social networks, but that was not successful either.
