The Prosecutor’s Office will try to stop Judge Juan Carlos Peinado, who has decided to open proceedings on the wife of the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez. The public ministry announced yesterday that it would directly appeal, before the Provincial Court of Madrid, the decision of the instructor so that it is annulled and the complaint filed.
The arguments of the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office are that the facts described in the complaint by Manos Limpias are not criminal and, moreover, they do not provide any indication other than journalistic information from various digital media. The main basis for requesting the filing of these proceedings is the same jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, which since 2017 marks when a case must be opened.
The High Court has repeatedly said so. In 2017, he dismissed a complaint against a senator because, “despite the initial possible criminal appearance of the facts alleged in the complaint, no element or principle of proof is offered that reasonably supports their reality.” With this same argument, the Penal Chamber of the High Court, with Manuel Marchena as speaker, rejected a complaint that Vox presented in 2018 against the then state attorney general, Dolores Delgado.
In 2021, the same thing happened again, but this time with several complaints from Esquerra Unida and other formations against the king emeritus, Joan Carles de Borbó, for his fortune abroad. This time, the complainants relied on journalistic information, as well as on proceedings that the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office had opened on the facts. In this resolution, the court emphasized that the complaints basically reproduce the content of press reports, 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 action to turn the journalistic story into a story of punishable facts triggering the criminal process. The value judgments of those who intend to exercise popular action do not turn the news into a crime”, the Supreme Court then pointed out in a resolution. With this jurisprudence, in addition to the guidelines of two circulars from the Attorney General of the State, from 2013 and 2022, the prosecutor in charge of the case understands that Peinado should not have agreed to open proceedings with a simple denunciation of the pseudo-union Clean Hands In addition, the prosecutor blames the head of the court of inquiry number 41 of Madrid for not even asking him for a report and for not having found out about this matter through the media.
Manos Limpias tried to rectify yesterday when he warned in a statement that his text is limited to collecting published journalistic information about BegoñaGómez, but that it will be up to the judge to determine the veracity of the information, and implicitly admit that it could be false.
The complaint, of seven pages, and on these sources of information, accuses Gómez of a crime of influence peddling. According to the text, taking advantage of her status as the wife of the president of the Spanish Government, she recommended by letter entrepreneurs who would have received tenders for public works. And he gives the example of a businessman, Carlos Barrabés, who received ten million in public funds. According to the complaint, the businessman organized a master’s degree in which the wife of the head of the Executive took part. Gómez’s letters of recommendation triggered, according to the complaint, the tenders to the businessmen, with whom they had a friendly relationship.
Always based on journalistic news, it also links Gómez to Víctor Aldama, one of the businessmen investigated in the Koldo case, for having received millionaire contracts from public companies linked to the Ministry of Transport for the sale of masks in the midst of a pandemic.
