The Provincial Court of Madrid partially accepted the appeals presented by the defense of Begoña Gómez and the prosecution against the investigation carried out by judge Juan Carlos Peinado in the trial against the wife of the president of the government. Concretely, the judges of Article 23 once again order Peinado to exclude from the ordered procedure everything relating to the rescue of the Air Europa company, in the same way as they did in the first appeal presented by the public prosecutor against the magistrate’s instructions. .
In today’s order, the Madrid court rejects the file request submitted by Gómez’s defense and the prosecution, but criticizes Judge Peinado for explaining “genericly and imprecisely” why he was investigating Begoña Gómez , without complying with the first order of this court which has already defined the case. The judges of the higher court leave “the facts relating to Globalia out of the investigation until truly new facts with incriminating content appear and are evaluated in a reasoned judicial resolution”.
Much of the arguments in the prosecution’s and defense’s appeals against Peinado’s actions focus on an earlier resolution by the same judges who must now respond to the two new appeals. The Provincial Court authorized the investigation into the president’s wife, in response to a quick file request from the prosecution, but the judges limited the facts that Peinado could investigate to contracts awarded by public companies to a company owned by Carlos Barrabés. Regarding the rest of the Clean Hands complaint that gave rise to the case, he said it was either a hoax or there was no evidence of a crime.
In this sense, the court understands, as it did in its response to the first appeals, that the investigation must be limited to the relations between Begoña Gómez and the business group of Juan Carlos Barrabés. “The striking variation, quantitative and qualitative, experienced by the relationship between the companies of the Barrabés group and the public administration in the temporal proximity of obtaining the Chair [de la Complutense] and the takeoff of the masters is really significant,” he says.
