The Superior Court of Justice of Madrid has decided to reject the complaint that Pedro Sánchez presented through the State Attorney’s Office against Judge Juan Carlos Peinado for prevarication. “Whether the formula chosen by the judge is correct or not, he did not want to question the President for his actions as an institution, but rather the defendant’s husband,” states the TSJM to endorse this diligence. The court has yet to decide whether to reject or admit the complaint that Begoña Gómez filed against the judge. One of the judges of the TSJ accuses the State Attorney’s Office of acting recklessly and of trying to disrupt the courts, even proposing a fine as punishment.
The President of the Government complained against the judge who has been investigating Begoña Gómez for months after her summons as a witness, in person in his office in La Moncloa and not in writing as permitted by law. The State Attorney’s Office understood that Juan Carlos Peinado could have incurred a crime of prevarication by incurring “arbitrariness” and also in an “unjust proceeding” in a manner that was “plainly contrary” to the regulations.
For the State Attorney’s Office, Peinado did not dedicate “a single line” to justify that Sánchez’s statement was made in person and not in writing. According to Peinado, Sánchez was not called to testify as President of the Government but as the husband of the accused, refusing that he could appear in writing as required by the Criminal Procedure Law but allowing him to do so in his office. “It is about preventing the exercise of judicial power from unnecessarily altering the course and work of the other state powers,” argued the State Attorney’s Office.
The Prosecutor’s Office had supported the opening of an investigation against Peinado, considering that he could have prevaricated in the process of summoning Pedro Sánchez as a witness, by not having “legally” motivated the need for the President of the Government to testify in person in La Moncloa and not in writing, as the Criminal Procedure Law allows. The Public Ministry requested the opening of proceedings to find out if behind this decision there was “a purpose unrelated to the process” without this being a “simple legal discrepancy” that can be resolved through the appeal system.
The Superior Court of Madrid now rejects these accusations of prevarication and even accuses the State Attorney’s Office of filing a complaint of a “speculative nature” against Peinado, exuding a “prejudice” and stating that it is due to “the attempt to distort” the crime of prevarication. . The summons of Sánchez as a witness, states the TSJM, “was clearly made for acts not derived from the exercise of the functions of President.”
The decision has been made unanimously with the votes of Celso Rodríguez and Francisco José Goyena, the magistrate who asked the Supreme Court to indict the attorney general, and with the added opinion of Jesús María Santos, especially critical of the State Attorney’s Office. This judge considers that the Lawyer’s complaint was “lack of foundation”, was “consciously gratuitous or arbitrary” and “seriously undermined the climate of serenity and calm that should accompany the work of the Judiciary”. This magistrate understands that the State Attorney’s Office and Pedro Sánchez should have been fined up to 6,000 euros for procedural recklessness.
The judges understand that the summons of the President of the Government is not an attack on the Government. “This is not the first time this has happened in our democratic history,” they say. They also affirm in an enigmatic way that there are judicial decisions that have influence on the political future of a country: “There are examples not so distant in time…”, says the order without specifying which one they are referring to.
Government sources have shown their respect for the resolution although they have shown their disagreement with the legal reasoning and the “argumentation” included in the order. “We are surprised by some unusual and unnecessary manifestations for the legal motivation of the Order, especially when the Presidency of the Government and the State Attorney’s Office only intend to preserve the guarantee of the exercise of a right that corresponds to the institution and see if its violation could constitute an illegal act. criminal”, authorized sources have said. “Our obligation as a Government is, as always, to defend legality, the rule of law and institutions,” they add.
These same sources have insisted on the idea conveyed by the complaint that the sole purpose of calling the President of the Government to testify was to “convert that declaration into an instrument to politically harm the Executive by instrumentalizing a judicial procedure.” “Unfortunately, this suspicion has turned out to be true. The same day that the judge sent the statement to the private accusations, various far-right, fundamentalist and anti-vaccine organizations, it was leaked to numerous media outlets,” he adds.
A pending complaint
This is not the only complaint for prevarication that weighs on Juan Carlos Peinado for his management of the proceedings in which he investigates the professional activity of Begoña Gómez. The wife of the President of the Government, through her lawyer Antonio Camacho, filed a complaint against him, expanding the accusations to other decisions that he has made over the last few months from his court: a case, complaint, “perverse and “prospective” based on a complaint from far-right organizations such as Manos Cleans, HazteOir or the Vox party.
The Prosecutor’s Office has opposed the admission of this complaint, understanding that the complaints of the wife of the President of the Government must be resolved through appeals and not as a case of alleged prevarication.
The same TSJM judges also rejected a third criminal action against Peinado, this one coming from Máximo Pradera, who accuses the instructor of revealing secrets due to some public communications about the case through the press office when the secrecy of the summary weighed on the case. In this matter, the Prosecutor’s Office has asked that Pradera’s complaint be rejected but that it be investigated whether one of the popular accusations, the lawyer Aitor Guisasola, incurred in revealing secrets by communicating certain decisions through his account on the social network X and his YouTube channel where he accumulates hundreds of thousands of followers.
Source: www.eldiario.es
