Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares assures that no one outside Spain questions the procedural situation of the Prime Minister and his family and denounced “the harassment” that, according to him, the Prime Minister has also suffered at the hands of Judge Coiffure, something he did not explicitly mention in an interview on Cadena SER.
“Nobody asks me about these issues abroad. “The Spanish are aware that there is harassment of all kinds against the president of the government,” he said. According to Albares, “at first they tried to denigrate his policy, but since it is a solid policy that benefits the majority of Spaniards, they decided to attack him as a person to try to destroy him. But since he is a strong person, they decided to attack his family with the greatest meanness,” he criticized.
After a brief summer break, Judge Juan Carlos Peinado is back to lead the investigation into alleged corruption that began last April against Begoña Gómez, wife of the president of the government. In the last four months, none of the proceedings have produced clear evidence of a crime against the people investigated: Gómez, businessman Carlos Barrabés and the rector of the Complutense University, Joaquín Goyache. The magistrate has not specified what he accuses them of. In addition, the investigations have already accumulated two exculpatory reports from the Civil Guard and half a dozen testimonies that deny irregularities in the events initially reported by the ultra-union Clean Hands.
One of Peinado’s first decisions after the summer recess was to guarantee that the parties in person – including therefore the far-right organizations that promote the accusation – have access to the recording of Pedro Sánchez’s non-statement at the Moncloa Palace. The publication of the image of the president before the judge, even as a witness, is only a matter of time. Precedents indicate that no judicial statement of media interest has ever managed not to be reproduced by the media. And everything indicates that this case will be no exception.
In addition to this decision, the judge reactivates the case with a battery of witness statements related to the three lines of investigation that he keeps open, ignoring the delimitations of the Madrid court. One of them concerns the million-dollar public contracts obtained by businessman Carlos Barrabés, whose address was registered this Friday by the Civil Guard. Another is the relationship that Gómez established at the Instituto de Empresa (IE) with the owners of Globalia, owner of the Air Europa company, and which was later saved by the government during the pandemic. And a third ramification is the relationship between the wife of the president of the government and the Complutense University of Madrid.
On the latter issue, the judge agreed this week to summon Reale Seguros CEO Ignacio Mariscal and La Caixa Foundation Deputy CEO Marc Simón Martínez for Monday. Both companies sponsored the Competitive Social Transformation Chair that Gómez directed at Complutense.
