The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has intensified his judicial strategy against Judge Juan Carlos Peinado. This Thursday, the State Attorney General’s Office, representing the President, requested the extension of the complaint for judicial prevarication that it had already filed at the end of July against the magistrate, according to the newspaper El País. The brief, presented before the Civil and Criminal Chamber of the High Court of Justice of Madrid, maintains that Peinado incurs an “intrinsic injustice” and makes “forced or artificial interpretations” of the current doctrine.
Peinado is investigating the case of Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, for alleged crimes of influence peddling and commercial corruption. The conflict dates back to July 30, when Judge Peinado went to La Moncloa with the intention of questioning Sánchez in his capacity as Gómez’s husband. The president’s statement lasted barely two minutes. This appearance, which by law should have been made in writing, gave rise to an initial complaint against the judge that the Attorney General’s Office filed before the High Court of Justice of Madrid on the grounds that his summons had been “unfair” and issued “knowingly.”
However, the extension of the complaint comes after the decision issued by Judge Peinado on August 22, which suggests that “conclusions” can be drawn from the “silence” of Sánchez, who used his right not to testify as a witness due to his relationship with the person being investigated, according to the document that EL PAÍS had access to. The Public Ministry interprets this statement as an attempt to give undue publicity to the process, far from the purpose of the judicial investigation. According to the document presented, the magistrate would be inappropriately using a procedural right of witnesses, transforming it into an “unfounded source of deductions with procedural effects.”
The Prosecutor’s Office has repeatedly questioned Judge Peinado’s actions, stressing that the investigation lacks “sufficient evidence” and that the resolutions issued respond more to personal convictions than to an objective exercise of his judicial function. The magistrate ordered the delivery of a copy of the recording of Sánchez’s statement to the defendants in the case, among whom are Vox and the far-right pseudo-union Manos Médicas – which initiated the trial against Gómez. He did so with a criterion contrary to that of the prosecution, which considered that the dissemination of this recording could lead to inappropriate leaks and that this should not have happened.
The prosecution expressed concern about the “continuous leaks” in the case and accused the magistrate of failing to take adequate measures to prevent the abusive disclosure of information, stressing that Peinado acts with “awareness” of the leaks but without exercising the relevant disciplinary powers.
In addition to Sánchez’s complaint, Begoña Gómez also filed a complaint against Judge Peinado for prevarication, alleging that he adopted “arbitrary and manifestly unjust” decisions and imposed the rules in a “perverse” instruction. Gómez’s lawyer, former minister Antonio Camacho, requested that the magistrate be investigated for alleged crimes of prevarication, disclosure of procedures declared secret and disclosure of secrets by a public official.
The Provincial Court of Madrid plans to deliberate and vote on September 30 on whether to authorize Judge Peinado to continue the investigation into the Begoña Gómez case, as requested by Gómez’s defense and the prosecution. According to the resolutions issued so far, the investigation focuses on the president’s wife’s ties to the Complutense University of Madrid, her relationship with businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés and her ties to Javier Hidalgo, former CEO of Globalia, the group that owns Air Europa, saved by the government during the pandemic, a practice that other EU countries have also carried out.
Sánchez publicly defended the complaint of malfeasance against Peinado, calling the judge’s attempt to question him in La Moncloa a “set-up” and describing as “pathetic and embarrassing” the spectacle organized by the far-right associations that tried to access the Palace. The President of the Government insisted that the judge’s actions violated the rights recognized by the institution of the Presidency of the Government since 1886, and reiterated his willingness to defend the legality of this position.
