The Prosecutor’s Office has filed an appeal against the decision of a Madrid court to open an investigation against Begoña Gómez, wife of the President of the Government, at the request of a complaint from Clean Hands based on press reports. The Public Ministry renounces appealing the opening of the case before the court itself and jumps directly to the filter of the Provincial Court, requesting the revocation of the order and the filing of the case. The Prosecutor’s Office understands that the complaint from Clean Hands does not provide any evidence that justifies the opening of a criminal case.
Yesterday the court made public the admission for processing of the complaint by Miguel Bernad’s pseudo-union against Begoña Gómez, opening proceedings that it declared secret and calling the journalists who signed the information that cements the lawsuit to testify in the coming weeks. Information about Gómez’s professional activity at the Africa Center of the International University whose veracity, the complainant organization itself has acknowledged, has not been verified.
The Prosecutor’s Office, after receiving the order to open proceedings from the magistrate, has chosen to appeal the opening of proceedings and, in practice, request that the case be archived. He has not chosen to appeal the order before the court itself but has gone directly to the higher body, the Provincial Court of Madrid, in charge of supervising and resolving the appeals of the judicial process.
The existence of this judicial process has moved to the political field with the announcement by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, to take a period of five days to decide whether he remains in office or resigns after what he defines as a “campaign of harassment.” ” of the right and the extreme right against him and his family. The reaction of the PP, after months of using the same information that Clean Hands has denounced to charge against Gómez, has been to accuse Sánchez of victimizing himself and, in the words of its leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, wanting to govern out of “compassion.”
The accusations by Manos Limpas revolve around the letters that Gómez signed, representing the private university for which he works, recommending a UTE in a public award process that he finally obtained. Letters identical to those he presented in that same process, for example, to the Madrid City Council of José Luis Martínez-Almeida, which in the case of Gómez the pseudo-union describes as a “magic card” in his complaint.
The complaint also includes, without any nuance, a false news article published a few days ago by the digital The Objective. A news item in which the headline stated that the executive was hiding the data of a subsidy granted to Begoña Gómez, illustrated with a photo of the wife of the President of the Government. The subsidy, in reality, had been granted to a Cantabrian businesswoman in the hospitality sector with the same name. Media outlets like Telemadrid backed down and acknowledged that they had spread the hoax without verifying its content.
They are “just” press clippings
In the last few hours, the Clean Hands organization itself has acknowledged in a statement that its complaint is based exclusively on news published in the media and that it does not provide any type of additional evidence. “It will now be the judge who must verify whether said journalistic information is true or not,” said Miguel Bernad in a statement sent this morning to the media.
Clean Hands, a self-proclaimed union, has been promoting criminal actions against political leaders, as well as judges and prosecutors, for more than a decade, with few of their complaints and complaints passing the first filter of judicial admission for processing. They were the architects of the complaint that, for example, brought Judge Baltasar Garzón to the bench for investigating the crimes of the Franco regime, a case that ended in acquittal. They also promoted the popular accusation against Infanta Cristina de Borbón in the Nóos case, with the courts rejecting her theory and condemning the king’s sister as responsible for profit as requested by the Prosecutor’s Office.
In 2016, Miguel Bernad himself spent eight months in provisional prison accused of being part of an extortionist tandem with Ausbanc, charges of which he was finally acquitted. The Supreme Court determined that they could not be convicted of extortion.
Source: www.eldiario.es
