The Madrid Provincial Court cleared this Monday one of the paths on which the Popular Party will advance in the coming months in its attempt to recover the Central Government. Three judges of this instance warned that the trial against Begoña Gómez, the wife of the president of the government, would be long and tortuous for the person indicted, if the support they gave to the controversial instruction drawn up by the judge Juan Carlos Peinado is taken into account.
The judges of Article 23 used the response they had to give to the appeals presented by Gómez’s defense and the prosecution to encourage the work of the instructor. Although the Provincial Court order partially upholds one of the appellants’ motions – which narrows the case – it does so only along the same lines as months ago, excluding any investigation into the Air bailout Europa. The judge’s order is therefore reiterated and until now it has been ignored by the magistrate with various subterfuges.
And for these three lines which appear in the operative part of the order in favor of the person under investigation, there are beforehand a good number of paragraphs in which the judges of the Provincial Court question the arguments in his defense. The magistrates intervene fully in the case to promote certain lines of investigation and assume as their own the suspicions that propel Peinado’s actions. And, most importantly, the judges attack the waterline of Gómez’s defense against Judge Peinado when they come to refute that the Civil Guard reports are clearly favorable to the person under investigation .
The judges come to say that only the contracts of the businessman Carlos Barrabés should be the subject of an investigation, but they warn against the scope of this assertion since they do not refer only to the three of the initial complaint from Manos Cleans but to a total of 11 worth 21. million euros.
The Popular Party found perfect timing this Monday. In the morning it became known that the Madrid formation would call Begoña Gómez to testify in the Regional Assembly, a change in the strategy of the conservatives to which the national PP reacted by transferring “maximum respect” to an “autonomous decision” .
By adopting its decision, the PP of Madrid could count on the fact that Article 23 of the Court of Madrid, with a totally conservative composition, would rule in the way it did. It was enough to read several newspaper articles in recent days that anticipated what ultimately happened.
It was more difficult to guess, for anyone who did not have access to the court, that the order would be made and known today. That same morning, the three judges met, debated and before going to lunch, they had prepared a 23-page resolution full of jurisprudence, developed arguments and technical details on the Peinado investigation.
Borja Sémper, the national spokesperson for the PP, was rightly surprised by the decision of the Madrid Court during his press conference on Monday. Isabel Díaz Ayuso does not decide in the Senate and the parliamentary group of the Upper House has reactivated the Koldo case commission with new requests for appearance and the live rumor that they will decide at some point to use their majority to summon Pedro Sanchez.
A sentence from the order of the judges of the Provincial Court gives the PP plenty of time to decide when it can cause more harm to the government with the summons of Sánchez: “[La instrucción] “This is a very initial phase, given the complexity of the facts investigated and the difficulty encountered in investigating the operations whose discovery is planned.”
As happened during Peinado’s statement to the president in Moncloa, Begoña Gómez’s summons to the Madrid Assembly promises to contribute little or nothing to the clarification of the facts. People under investigation and called to other parliamentary committees take advantage of their right not to testify so as not to harm their interests in court.
As in the case of Sánchez, Gómez’s statement will leave an image. And if the president of the government spent two minutes in front of Peinado, Begoña Gómez can spend a long time in front of the cameras in silence, listening to questions from regional deputies that she does not want to answer.
It is no longer Judge Peinado who writes indecipherable paragraphs that even contain erroneous articles of law. However, his colleagues at the higher level, those who have followed and will continue to follow the cause, go so far as to affirm: “The striking variation, quantitative and qualitative, that the relationship between the companies of the Barrabés group and the public administration has experienced in temporal proximity with obtaining the Chair [de la Complutense que dirigía Gómez] and the takeoff of the masters is truly significant.
UCO reports
Gómez’s legal and political defense is based on the fact that two reports from the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard exclude delinquency in the events investigated. However, the Madrid Court goes into detail and assures that this does not exclude influence peddling in the eleven public contracts with different administrations that a Barrabés company obtained for 21 million euros.
The reason why Begoña Gómez’s defense requested the file is that the Madrid court, in a previous order, had limited Peinado’s investigation to three contracts awarded by the public company red.es and that these calls for offers had already been the subject of an investigation by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office because it involves European funds.
Faced with this, the judges who imposed this limitation now affirm that “99 procurement files were located, the amount of which is estimated at 24,923,443 euros (…) the majority of which would have been obtained by Innova Next. SL, without all of them being financed by European funds via red.es.
And they conclude: “Without forgetting that the perfect allocation of markets [que exponía la Guardia Civil] “This would not prevent the prior commission of the offense of influence peddling.” They express this in reference to the fact that the signing of two standard letters of recommendation, which Barrabés’ company had requested from the Complutense master and many other organizations and administrations, in the case of the PP City Hall, had prompted Barrabés to get these rewards.
The judges introduce the question of the creation of a company by Begoña Gómez on November 21, 2023 under the name Transforma TSC, a company whose “object and name coincide with the title of the master’s degree from the Complutense University whose investigated is co-director.” Although for information only, warn the magistrates, this fact “would make it possible to add to our first approximation (…) the existence of a professional interest not only in the field of teaching but also in the field of business.
