MadridJuan Carlos Peinado has become the antagonist of Pedro Sánchez for the investigation he opened on April 16 against his wife, Begoña Gómez, for influence peddling and corruption in business. The president of the Spanish government months ago abandoned the prudence that usually guides the executive’s pronouncements on the decisions of the judiciary and went on to attack the head of the 41st District Court in Madrid. To the point of reporting him for prevarication. The Superior Court of Justice of Madrid (TSJM) is studying this Tuesday whether to admit the complaint of the socialist leader against the magistrate and it is doing so the day after the High Court of Madrid endorsed that the controversial judge continues to investigate Gómez, albeit with limitations .
Why is Peinado questioned?
According to the Spanish government, there is no case and the magistrate has decided to pursue the wife of the head of the executive for political reasons, even committing procedural irregularities, such as having forced Sánchez’s statement in person as a witness in the Palau de the Moncloa “I’ve been pedaling for six months in the middle of nowhere,” spokeswoman Pilar Alegría defended a week ago, for the umpteenth time in the press conference after the council of ministers. One of the arguments for questioning the research is its origin. It starts from a complaint by Manos Limpias which, as the far-right union itself admitted, was based on news that could be false. This organization was followed by the Hazte Oír association, with another complaint, which joined the previous one. Peinado has also admitted as popular accusations other parties and entities linked to the extreme right, such as Vox, which he also allowed to enter Moncloa to question Sánchez. One more reason to attribute this ideological character to research.
What can be further investigated and what is discarded?
The Madrid Court, however, gave Peinado the green light this Monday to continue the investigation. He did it despite these complaints and despite the arguments of Gómez’s defense, which demanded the filing of the case, due to the fact that it considers it “prospective” and “indeterminate”: that is, initiated without reasonable suspicions to treat to incriminate someone without good reason. This complaint was joined by the Prosecutor’s Office, which claimed to limit the investigation because it saw it as a “general cause”. The Provincial Court has partially accepted their requests and, as it already did at the end of May, has again reminded the investigating magistrate that he must exclude a line of investigation.
This is the part related to Globalia. Sánchez’s wife was from the summer of 2018 until the summer of 2022 the director of the Africa Center, a newly created center of the private university IE (Instituto de Empresa) that was born with the aim of promoting projects on the African continent. As director of the organization, Gómez met several times between 2019 and 2020 with the then CEO of the Globalia tourism group, Javier Hidalgo. A few months later, the airline Air Europa, owned by Globalia, was rescued with 475 million euros of public funds. The Madrid Court already ruled out a link between the rescue and Gómez’s contacts.
Now, the interlocutory of the Provincial Court defends that there are reasons to investigate everything that derives “from the relationship between the investigated and the businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés”, also investigated for having been the beneficiary of public contracts and being at the same time Gómez’s collaborator in a chair at the Complutense University of Madrid. Although the European Prosecutor’s Office stayed the investigation of three lots tendered by the public entity Red.es due to the possible involvement of European funds, the Madrid Court denies that this has left the investigation without content. The interlocutory cites a report from the Civil Guard from mid-May that locates 99 public procurement files of the Barrabés group of companies with an amount of almost 25 million euros, most of them in the Innova Next company “without them being all of them financed by European funds through Red.es”.
Are there any signs?
In the UCO report, the Madrid Court sees “objective data in which the personal intervention of the accused in support of the Barrabés companies was verified and which justify the investigation” and a “glaring variation, quantitative and qualitative, which experiences the relationship of the companies of the Barrabés group with the public administration in temporal proximity with the obtaining of the chair and the take-off of the master’s degrees” at the UCM. Although Gómez’s defense asserts that the Civil Guard did not detect irregularities in the awarding procedure, the Provincial Court maintains that it is necessary to investigate as well because “the perfect awarding of tenders would not prevent the prior commission of a crime of trafficking of influences”.
The link with Complutense
The alleged irregularities related to Complutense are spreading with new lawsuits, such as the one Peinado currently has on the table that accuses Gómez of misappropriating a university software. The Madrid Court leaves the possibility of expanding this branch in their hands. For the time being, Gómez will have to give explanations about his relationship with the UCM in a commission of inquiry in the Assembly of Madrid, in which the PP of Isabel Díaz Ayuso has decided to cite her in the first session and has seen how the university canceled the only master’s degree she had left “unilaterally”, as she herself reported to LinkedIn.
Source: www.ara.cat
