Judge Juan Carlos Peinado has followed his custom and has dedicated another Wednesday of Holy Week to listening to the defenses and accusations of the Begoña Gómez case. The procedure was not new either. A mere formality to inform them that, if it goes to trial, it will be before a popular jury. The parts have not gone off script either. Those investigated – the wife of the President of the Government, his advisor Cristina Álvarez and the businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés – have not attended in person, leaving their defense in the hands of their lawyers, who have demanded that the case be definitively closed, as has the Prosecutor’s Office. The accusations, on the other hand, have demanded that the instructor delve deeper into the investigation and commission new proceedings, according to the legal sources consulted by EL PAÍS.
Anticipating a new rejection of their claims, the defenses of Gómez and Álvarez have asked Peinado that, if he decides to move forward with the case, he accept several procedures. The lawyer for Sánchez’s wife, former minister Antonio Camacho, has demanded the testimony of José Manuel Ruano, the director of the chair that Gómez co-directed at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), as a witness, and that it allows him to provide three expert reports. One of them, to analyze the figure of the spouse of the President of the Government with the aim of proving that traditionally all couples have had an assistant who helped them in their affairs; another on the operation of the extraordinary professorships of the UCM; and a third about the alleged economic damage to the university center.
Camacho has taken advantage of his intervention to reiterate that there is no basis to investigate any of the five crimes that Peinado attributes to Gómez: embezzlement, influence peddling, business corruption, brand misappropriation and professional intrusion. The lawyer has denounced this “already seen” describing it as a real “nightmare” due to the lack of guarantees that he understands dominates the case. In this sense, he has warned that “something else” that is not Justice is being pursued, directly criticizing the lack of impartiality of the instructor. “A disservice is being done to the image of Justice,” he lamented.
For his part, the lawyer defending Álvarez, José María de Pablos, has asked Peinado to request a certificate from Moncloa for his client that certifies the fulfillment of his duties. In his turn, prosecutor José Manuel San Baldomero has once again advocated filing the case. In a letter submitted this Wednesday, he stated that “after almost two years of investigation,” “perhaps” the exculpatory allegations that have been presented at this time can be analyzed – “if only to be discarded.” “It is not idle to remember article 2 of the Criminal Procedure Law and the need for authorities and officials involved in the criminal procedure to record and appreciate both the adverse and favorable circumstances for the alleged inmate,” he stressed.
At the other extreme, popular accusations, led by Hazte Oír, have proposed Peinado demand Gómez’s entire working life to date; an update on the salary that Álvarez earns; and to request information from the Lefevbre platform about a meeting related to the software developed within the framework of the chair, which was already reported by Making Science – another company that participated in the project – indicating that Gómez’s advisor was one of the participants.
Towards a popular jury trial
It is the second time that the judge has done this procedure. Already in September, when the procedure was divided into two pieces, he informed the wife of the President of the Executive that, if the embezzlement case went to trial, a popular jury and not a court made up of judges would judge him. Then, he unified the investigation and warned that the entire case would follow the same course. However, the Provincial Court of Madrid corrected him and warned him that, if he wanted to maintain that line, he had to justify it with sufficient arguments.
Peinado responded in mid-March with a 47-page resolution in which he insisted that there is sufficient “criminal plausibility” to prosecute the suspects. He reiterated that Gómez has taken advantage of her status as the wife of the President of the Government and leader of the PSOE to benefit from a “radical” change in her professional career and that her advisor has carried out “actions completely unrelated to the institutional functions of the Presidency.” The defense appealed the decision and assured that everything was “mere conjecture.”
The case broke out in April 2024 as a result of a complaint filed by Hands Cleans but since then it has been expanding with complaints filed by Hazte Oír and Vox. On the one hand, Peinado investigates Gómez’s professional activity with businessmen and the UCM; and, on the other, if there was a diversion of public money when hiring Álvarez as his advisor in La Moncloa to collaborate with his institutional activity and with his “private activity”, a thesis that both have denied.
