“If a judge calls me, I will have no difficulty in answering his questions. And if the content and scope of the interrogation do not seem correct to me, I have legal mechanisms to say so.” This is how the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, reacted to the leak of the very brief judicial statement of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, in the case currently being investigated against his wife. But a year ago, when he was already at the head of his party, he stood up to a judge in Salamanca who was investigating a trial for internal conflict.
In January 2023, Feijóo was called to testify as an accused in a preliminary proceeding in an investigation into a trial due to the delay in convening the provincial congress of the PP of Salamanca. Feijóo, as national president of the PP, was invited by the judge to present the party’s version.
But Feijóo did not show up for the appointment. And the judge recorded his anger at the PP leader’s sit-in. “The person who was summoned was Mr. Feijóo,” the magistrate said. The PP alleged that its leader had no information to provide, but the judge did not accept this argument. “That he would have come to tell me: I know absolutely nothing, I can’t tell you anything, I can’t help you. He was the one who was summoned, the man who is now before me was not summoned,” the magistrate noted.
The judge’s anger leaves no doubt: “It is the PP and Feijóo who decide when the evidence is relevant, it is not the case, if we go or not because we have to bring something or not,” she lamented. “It is the PP who unilaterally decides if it is relevant, if it will bring something or not, evading the decision of this judge,” the official reproached.
The judge recalled that Feijóo had been cited “expressly”, and not “in general terms”, and that she had not given the PP the possibility of choosing who would appear. “Unilaterally, the PP decides that the practice of evidence cannot be carried out because it does not consider it appropriate,” he said during the hearing on precautionary measures.
The judge repeatedly asked the lawyer for the Popular Party if he had read the court ruling – which he assured he had not been informed of – even though he knew that the summons concerned Alberto Núñez Feijóo. “It was clear who this person was, wasn’t it? If the PP, in this case Mr. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, did not show up, it was because they did not consider it appropriate, because he was summoned, the man in front of me was not summoned,” he concluded.
Feijóo’s attitude contradicts his statement this Tuesday in an interview with Telecinco. Feijóo attacked Sánchez for filing a complaint against Judge Juan Carlos Peinado and using the Public Ministry to do so, exactly what he later indicated he would do if he were called to testify and did not agree. But Feijóo did the opposite at the time of what he says he would do today.
