The Court of First Instance number 8 of Marbella acquitted elDiario.es of the lawsuit filed by the mayor of the city, Ángeles Muñoz, who demanded 50,000 euros from this media for an alleged violation of his right to honor committed through the publication of eleven articles. Muñoz must pay the costs of the procedure.
Judge Luna González Pinto ruled that the information the mayor alluded to in her trial was of “public interest”, as the prosecution defended during the September 10 trial. The judge assures that, through the documentary evidence, as well as the statement during the hearing of the journalist who signed most of the information, it has been proven that all were “scrupulously verified”.
elDiario.es revealed on October 23, 2022 that a son-in-law of the mayor and his husband had been prosecuted by the National Court in a case of drug trafficking and money laundering. From this news, based on the indictment to which this newspaper had access, elDiario.es undertook an investigation into the trial before the National Court, which was expanded to other extremes of the action of the government of Ángeles Muñoz, up to the alleged interference in this by his relatives prosecuted for drug trafficking and money laundering, but also to his enormous capital after 30 years devoted exclusively to politics.
One of the pieces of information that Muñoz considered violating his right to honor was published on October 24, 2022 under the title “Son-in-law of the mayor of Marbella, prosecuted for drug trafficking: “The city is ours, the Junta… the fucking Andalusia”. The information included the telephone interventions that the Unit for Combating Economic and Fiscal Delinquency (UDEF) of the police had carried out with judicial authorization to Joakim Broberg, still waiting for judgment and under which the prosecution accuses him of 25 years in prison.
Subsequently, elDiario.es published that the Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s Office and the Court of Instruction Number 6 of the National Court had ignored three reports in which the UDEF requested the opening of a new line of investigation aimed at investigating a possible corruption around Ángeles Muñoz.
According to the complaint filed by Mayor Muñoz against this media, its journalists had “seriously damaged the honor, personal dignity and image” of the Marbella councilor, attributing to her “acts of criminal appearance and behavior considered seriously dishonest by society.” “, all with a clear disregard for the truth and with the undisguised intention of harming him, both personally and politically.”
None of this happened, according to the court resolution that filed the lawsuit against Muñoz. “The veracity of the information contained in the contested publications has been proven, since it is confirmed that the relatives of today’s complainant were immersed in a judicial investigation,” decides Judge González Pinto. “As the evidence proves, notably the testimony of Pedro Águeda Moreno, the information was scrupulously verified. Therefore, there is no reason to accept any rectification, rejecting the request in its entirety,” adds the judge.
Quote from a journalist
Ángeles Muñoz’s attempts to intimidate elDiario.es now extend to criminal proceedings, once the civil trial failed. The investigating court number 4 of Marbella, at the request of the mayor of the city, summoned the journalist of this media Pedro Águeda to testify as an investigator for an alleged crime of revealing secrets.
Muñoz’s complaint refers to two pieces of information signed by the aforementioned journalist. One of them concerns the participation of the mayor’s husband, now deceased, in the attribution of certain works to one of his friends, another Swedish businessman also prosecuted in the drug trafficking case and money laundering before the National Court. The second information describes the system of media patronage and possible embezzlement developed during Muñoz’s mandate.
Both pieces of information are based on emails from an address that belonged to the mayor and which were attached to a complaint for various corruption offenses filed in 2017 with the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office. The Marbella prosecutor who opened the investigation cites these two emails in his archiving order. The prosecutor concluded that the events could cause “discomfort,” but either did not constitute a crime or the statute of limitations had expired.
The Marbella investigating court, which summoned the elDiario.es journalist as part of the investigation, had previously taken his statement as a witness. In this first statement, the journalist explained that he had never had access to all of Muñoz’s e-mails and that he only cited in his information those which contained the court documents, referring to events which had not been nothing to do with Muñoz’s life and which were of total public interest. relevance.
