The latest resolutions of the different courts of Madrid protected Judge Juan Carlos Peinado in his investigation into Begoña Gómez. The approval of the Madrid Provincial Court for most of his procedures and the triple rejection by the Superior Court of Justice of the complaints accusing him of prevarication give the magistrate carte blanche to continue investigating the case against the president’s wife of the government. . An investigation that continues to focus on his relationship with the businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés and his work at the Complutense University of Madrid and which, in recent hours, adds a new front: two other crimes for alleged irregular appropriation of free software from the university.
Throughout her working relationship with Complutense University, Begoña Gómez directed two master’s degrees and a chair in competitive social transformation, all currently canceled by the center. Several companies funded the creation of software for one of their courses: a free digital tool for companies to measure and improve their sustainability success. Begoña Gómez created a web domain with a name very similar to that of her chair and that of one of her companies in which she hosted this software, paying 25 euros out of her own pocket.
It was Complutense herself who gave instructions to Begoña Gómez on how to create domains like this, and it was also she who told the judge of her suspicions regarding possible misappropriation, even though her internal investigation and its contacts with the Land Registry did not allow They found no activity on the part of the businesswoman in this regard. Information from the Intellectual Property Registry indicates that neither Begoña Gómez nor her company have registered this software in their name.
Finally, it was the ultra-Catholic group HazteOir, one of the popular accusations in the case, which filed a parallel complaint to the main case and managed to convince Judge Peinado to open a new branch of the trial emphasizing the theory of inscription.
The order insists that Gómez, as the complaint says, registered a trademark in his favor and finally the Cátedra software. The offense of embezzlement consists of illegally appropriating “money, effects, securities or any other thing” having a quantifiable value. This software, which Gómez did not register in his name, was free and the website in question was in testing before disappearing.
This new aspect of the case gives new impetus to the procedure with a new summons from the wife of the President of the Government. Begoña Gómez will have to appear in court again on November 18 to be personally informed of the complaint and to be summoned on another day to testify as a defendant. A new impetus for the cause which postpones for several months any decision on the hypothetical end of an investigation.
This is the latest twist in a procedure that began secretly last April after Manos Limpies filed a complaint with several press articles, including a hoax, abruptly accusing Begoña Gómez of favoring businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés in public awards with letters of recommendation and for having influenced the government. rescue of hundreds of millions of euros at Air Europa. All, according to the far-right pseudo-union, affirming her status as wife of the president of the government.
Judge Peinado expanded the case, also focusing on Begoña Gómez’s work at the Complutense University with her master’s degrees and chair, in her working relationship with the Africa Center of the Instituto de Empresa. And from the first moment, the great hope of the prosecution and the defense of the businesswoman was that the Madrid Provincial Court would archive the file or, at least, delimit as much as possible what they considered to be already in its first weeks destined to become a trawling investigation against everything that Begoña Gómez had done since she and her husband had left their suitcases at the Moncloa gate.
The Madrid court’s first order, last May, posed some obstacles, but no substantial limitations, to Peinado’s investigation. He criticized the fact that he had handled the summary secrecy in a chaotic manner, that he had requested information in a “generic” way from the Civil Guard and that he had started to investigate fraud during the rescue of a airline based on “conjectures” by Clean Hands, but he approved that the investigation be carried out into whether Gómez had used his status to further his career and that of the businessmen around him. There were suspicions, he said then, which “legitimate an investigation”.
In the following months, Peinado did not completely abandon the investigation into Air Europa that the Provincial Court had banned and expanded the horizons of the case to places where the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard had not noted any irregularities . He indicted Juan Carlos Barrabés and began investigating any connection between the professional activity of Begoña Gómez and La Moncloa, including possible preferential treatment from the Complutense University. On the way, he went to the Palace to try to collect a statement from Pedro Sánchez himself as a witness.
The second attack at the Madrid Provincial Court was settled at the beginning of October by another order which, far from closing the case as requested by the defense and the prosecution, gave carte blanche to the magistrate to pursue his various avenues of investigation. After brief reproaches to Peinado for having insisted on the path of rescuing Air Europa – another of the failed obsessions of the same popular accusations that they exercise in the Koldo case – and also for having declared that he had had all his life under the microscope since Pedro Sánchez was president, the Madrid court generally supported Peinado’s case defended by Vox, HazteOir, Manos Cleans, Iustitia Europa and lawyer Aitor Guisasola.
File zooms out
In practice, this decision puts a great distance in time between any amendment of the entire Provincial Court of Madrid to the instruction of Juan Carlos Peinado who has carte blanche to continue the investigation while showing few signs of abandonment between procedures that do not develop. the signs of criminality that Manos Liminas’ complaint promised. The letters of recommendation that led to the opening of the file did not require additional examination by the judge, the Central Operational Unit ruled out any irregularity in the public contracts awarded to Juan Carlos Barrabés and the University Compluense explained to the judge that it hired Begoña Gómez for her “professional career.”
Peinado’s decisions were not bolstered by ordinary resources alone. They also received criminal support from the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid, which in recent weeks rejected three complaints filed against the judge for prevarication. Something that not only prevents a possible accusation by the magistrate, but also closes the way to possible challenges and withdrawals of the file. And it thus resolves numerous criticisms that have been made against its management of education.
The first rejected complaint was that of journalist Máximo Pradera, who accused the judge of revealing secrets by issuing press releases about the case while it was under summary secrecy. The second is the one presented by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic in favor of Pedro Sánchez, who focused his accusations of prevarication on his summons as a witness. The response was not only a refusal to open a file: it was a severe reproach from the judges to the legal profession, one of the magistrates having even proposed, without success, that the President of the Government himself be exposed fined for carelessness in his accusations. against the instructor.
The third “no” from the TSJM came with the rejection of the complaint presented by Begoña Gómez herself, which was broader and covered almost the entire management of her case by Judge Peinado. The judges were not as forceful as in the prosecution’s criminal case, but they rejected the existence of evidence that Peinado was hatching some sort of plan to harm the businesswoman. And they strengthened, in their own way, the investigation into the case: many of the things raised by Gómez’s defense, said the TSJM, were reproaches that should be expressed through appeals and not complaints.
All these decisions do not completely close the door to a future filing of the file before the Provincial Court or to a possible investigation for prevarication. But for the first to happen, all the lines of inquiry launched by the judge must reach an impasse which, according to this court, is not close at the moment. And for the second to happen, the bar set by the TSJM goes well beyond anything it has done so far.
Meanwhile, the judge continues to move forward in all his lines of investigation and transforms the case into a macro case based on the demands made by the popular far-right accusations. His latest initiative concerning the free software Complutense involves two new visits to the court of the wife of the president of the government and an expansion of the procedure with the approval of the courts which supervise the case.
