As in the scalextrics present on the fair stands, a convoy of the ultra-Catholic platform HazteOir – two vans equipped with electronic screens and a bus – circulated this Wednesday morning on Pablo Neruda Avenue in Vallecas, in front of the Assembly of Madrid. The speakers were lacking, but the journalists were numerous, coming by the dozen to the headquarters of the Regional Legislative Assembly (a record so far this legislature), for the appearance of Begoña Gómez, wife of the president of the government, Pedro Sánchez. , to whom he had called to explain his relationship with the Complutense University of Madrid according to the parameters of PP and Vox.
Paragraph: the evening before, the Madrid president’s chief of staff had already hastened to conclude that this Wednesday, Begoña Gómez would go “forward”, in the language adopted both by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez and by his direct superior.
Begoña Gómez decided not to testify, despite the interruptions of the PP representative to the commission promoted by the absolute regional majority of Díaz Ayuso. And before remaining silent, she denounced, for the first time, that the trial opened against her and promoted by far-right organizations and parties had “an obvious political objective”. After the president’s wife left the Assembly, another accused showed up: Joaquín Goyache. Rector of the Complutense University of Madrid and one of the defendants in the case that Judge Juan Carlos Peinado has been pursuing for months.
The commission and the questions from the parties that promoted it had a single objective: to support the guilt of Begoña Gómez and, if possible, mix it with unrelated issues like the rescue of Air Europa or the presidency of the government. The result was not what the right hoped for. Goyache denied any type of favorable treatment to Gómez during the decade in which she collaborated with the UCM, defended the cleanliness of all processes surrounding the two masters and the chair that he directed until its recent cancellation and denied the broad outlines of college-related costs.
One of his first responses touched on the detail that most excited the popular accusations of the case. A few months ago, the lawyers of Vox, HazteOir, Manos Cleans and Iustitia Europa left the court visibly excited because Goyache had built a bridge that allowed them to reach Pedro Sánchez: their first meeting with Begoña Gómez about the chair had taken place in La Moncloa. This Wednesday, Goyache explained why: it was summer 2020, Spanish society was emerging from the confinements established by the COVD-19 pandemic and most of the university was closed.
As she explained, Begoña Gómez’s first proposal was to meet in the UCM area where she worked, “but it was closed.” Later he also offered to do it electronically, by “videoconference”, but in the end he invited Goyache to come to La Moncloa. “I had no problems, it was going to be easier for safety reasons,” he said. Asked by the PP about this detail which at the time gave rise to the accusations and the judge, Goyache also denied having seen Pedro Sánchez that day.
The president’s relationship with Begoña Gómez loomed over a good part of this Wednesday’s session. The truck that HazteOir, one of the popular accusations, drove in front of the door of the Madrid Assembly, ironically with a message: “Today Professor Begoña is arriving. The fundamentalist organization insists on ignoring the difference between a public university professor in the strict sense and the figure of “extraordinary professorship”: programs financed by private companies in collaboration with public universities with less demanding requirements for their direction.
Goyache explained other things. He said Gómez was the contact between the UCM and two companies: Reale Seguros and Fundación La Caixa. “The chair is created in agreement with two institutions, it is not created with Ms. Begoña Gómez, but with two very large institutions,” he stressed. He then assured that Begoña Gómez is not a professor and that even if no other chair director has a “similar profile” – without a higher degree – it is something achievable in these cases: “They cannot be doctors or graduates and propose or lead a chair.” “The co-leadership of an extraordinary chair does not involve any academic work, no qualifications are required, they are managers, the type of qualifications required for teaching activities regulated is not required, it is a management task.” The rector called it an “aberration” to say that they made Begoña Gómez a professor.
He also categorically denied that anyone gave preferential treatment to Gómez because she was the wife of the president of the government, another of Judge Peinado’s main lines of investigation. “Of course not,” he said the first time. “Everything was absolutely legal and regular, things were going very well,” he later assured. The Vox representative, whose party is the popular prosecutor in the case and has access to the statements of the accused and witnesses, then asked if Vice Chancellor Juan Carlos Doadrio said he felt obliged to hire Gómez : “What is said in the media and something else what he said in court. And before the judge, he recalled, he declared that “he never felt under pressure”. “I have the transcript of your statement,” the rector replied to the regional representative of Vox when she questioned his comments.
Joaquín Goyache’s words are those of an accused, but they coincide with what the UCM has publicly defended in recent years, even before the legal file existed. Already in 2023, a lawyer requested information from the center and he defended that he had Gómez because of his experience and his long history of collaborations with the university. The same thing he recently communicated in writing to Judge Peinado.
María Elvira Gutiérrez-Vierna, auditor of the UCM, was the last to appear at the Regional Assembly and during the interrogation she highlighted the only irregularity that she admits in the case, an administrative irregularity and not a criminal one , and which must be authorized to pay several invoices. She did so when this function corresponded to the rector. “It is a breach which results, in my opinion, in the nullity of the contract,” declared the appearing party, who had already indicated this in a report. And it was the center, through the vice-rector of Economy, which ended up approving the payment by delegation. However, he ruled out that some of these invoices had been cut and also denied the existence of false invoices.
“She abused her status as the president’s wife”
Much of Gómez’s appearance became a mix of questions and boos. The questions from the representatives of the PP and Vox were filled with affirmations and boos from the PSOE and Más Madrid who criticized, often unsuccessfully, that the PP deputy and president of the commission, Susana Pérez, had been so permissive when the two right-wing parties have clearly exceeded the aim of the commission: the irregularities of the Complutense.
Mercedes Zarzalejo was the popular deputy responsible for starting the interrogation, to whom ignorance cannot be attributed, since she is a doctor of law. Their questions, despite the interrogative intonation, were in practice statements in which the conclusions of the popular questions were already obvious; for example: “Why did she abuse her status as wife of the President of the Government to create a professional career that she had never had before?
Gómez entered the commission room accompanied by PSOE spokesperson Juan Lobato and other socialist deputies. The moment was able to be recorded unhindered by cameras because Assembly staff had relegated journalists without equipment to one side of the hallway, behind a cordon. Once seated and after Zarzalejo’s first volley, Gómez explained that she would not answer questions, but that by doing so she was already rejecting certain statements of the popular deputy. “For 25 years, I have worked in consulting and teaching, I have coordinated teams, managed projects, advised more than fifty professionals from the private sector and the third sector. 12 years ago I started a collaboration with Complutense, as co-director of a master’s degree with its own degrees to train professionals specialized in social and sustainable projects. It was in 2020 that this collaboration expanded with the creation of an extraordinary chair, which is a common practice in public and unpaid universities,” he said. She then defended having led “a professional life built with a lot of effort, like one more life”, as “millions of women do every day in our country”.
Unlike in court, where the questioning is suspended when the declarant refuses to answer, in the Assembly the questions continued, to the indignation of the PSOE. Dr. PP Law showed that for her, anyone not testifying is because they did something wrong, no matter what the Constitution says. “An innocent person who feels persecuted by her husband’s political adversaries would defend herself tooth and nail,” Zarzalejo determined, after an intervention in which she criticized Gómez for “infiltrating the academic world” and ” disguised herself as a teacher. . He also tried to link this affair to the corruption investigation of former minister José Luis Ábalos.
Gómez remained unfazed, occasionally drumming her fingers, occasionally glancing at the phone, but almost always looking MPs in the face. Even when Vox spokesperson Ana Cuartero spoke to the elevation at the start of her questioning, during which many substantive doubts were also not raised. “The intellectual author of the corruption plot that motivated this commission of inquiry is her husband, Pedro Sánchez,” she said. According to this story, Gómez is a “front man” who acts “servilely”. When the deputy described the head of the executive as an “autocrat”, the president of the commission, Susana Pérez Quislant, considered that she had gone too far. He asked Cuartero to remove it, but she refused without further explanation. He could have argued that the epithet was gentler than that of “Stalinist” that regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso usually devotes to Sánchez, but he did not do so.
The PSOE and Más Madrid intervened to question the very existence and development of the commission. “They are seeking to lynch the president by lynching his wife,” protested socialist Marta Bernardo, after recalling that the PP “vetoed five times” to investigations into deaths in retirement homes during Covid . Manuela Bergerot, from Más Madrid, recalled other vetoes, such as the appearance of Ayuso’s chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, due to hoaxes against the press. “The Community allocates 0.02% of its budget to presidents who wish to investigate with this commission,” he contextualized. President Pérez Quislant was inflexible, ordering them to keep quiet. “That is not the purpose of the commission,” he repeated. His regulatory zeal relaxed slightly when the deputies finished with Gómez.
