The Superior Court of Justice of Madrid has decided to reject the complaint filed by Pedro Sánchez through the Attorney General’s Office against Judge Juan Carlos Peinado for prevarication. The court made this decision with the dissenting vote of one of its members. “Whether the formula chosen by the judge is correct or not, he did not want to question the President for his action as an institution, but rather the husband of the accused,” specifies the TSJM to endorse this diligence. The court has not yet decided whether to reject or admit the complaint filed by Begoña Gómez against the judge.
The president of the government filed a complaint against the judge who has been investigating Begoña Gómez for months after he was summoned as a witness, in person in his office in La Moncloa and not in writing as permitted by law. The public prosecutor understood that Juan Carlos Peinado could have committed an offense of prevarication by engaging in “arbitrariness” and also an “unjust procedure” in a manner “manifestly contrary” to the regulations.
For the public prosecutor, Peinado did not devote “a single line” to justify that Sánchez’s statement was made in person and not in writing. According to Peinado, Sánchez was not called to testify as president of the government but as the husband of the accused, refusing that he could appear in writing as required by the Code of Criminal Procedure, but allowing him to do it in his office. “It is a question of preventing the exercise of judicial power from unnecessarily modifying the course and work of the other powers of the State,” argued the public prosecutor.
The prosecution had supported the opening of an investigation against Peinado, considering that he could have procrastinated in the process of summoning Pedro Sánchez as a witness, by not having “legally” motivated the need for the president of the government to testify in person at La Moncloa and not in writing, as permitted by the Code of Criminal Procedure. The public prosecutor requested the opening of a procedure to find out if behind this decision there was “a purpose unrelated to the procedure” without it being a “simple legal divergence” which could be resolved by the through the appeals system.
The Superior Court of Madrid now rejects these accusations of prevarication and even accuses the prosecution of having filed a complaint of “speculative nature” against Peinado, revealing a “prejudice” and affirming that this is due to “the attempt to distort” the crime of prevarication. The summons of Sánchez as a witness, affirms the TSJM, “clearly aimed at acts which did not arise from the exercise of the functions of president”.
A pending complaint
This is not the only complaint for prevarication that weighs on Juan Carlos Peinado for his management of the procedure in which he is investigating the professional activity of Begoña Gómez. The wife of the President of Government, through her lawyer Antonio Camacho, filed a complaint against him, extending the accusations to other decisions he has made in recent months in his court: a case, a complaint, “perverse and “prospective”. » based on a complaint from far-right organizations like Manos Cleans, HazteOir or the Vox party.
The Prosecutor’s Office opposed the admission of this complaint, considering that the complaints of the wife of the President of the Government must be resolved through appeal and not as a case of alleged prevarication.
The same judges of the TSJM also rejected a third criminal action against Peinado, this one emanating from Máximo Pradera, who accuses the instructor of having divulged secrets due to certain public communications about the case through the press office when the secrecy of the summary weighed on the file. In this case, the Prosecutor’s Office requested that Pradera’s complaint be dismissed but that an investigation be carried out to find out whether one of the popular accused, lawyer Aitor Guisasola, was engaged in revealing secrets by communicating certain decisions through his account on the social network X and his YouTube. channel where he accumulates hundreds of thousands of followers.
