The criminal case that Juan Carlos Peinado has been directing for a year and a half against Begoña Gómez is on its way to becoming a trial before a popular court for up to five different crimes. Complaints and complaints from the extreme right that started more than two years ago and that put all of her professional activity under suspicion since her husband was President of the Government, spread by a judicial case that already borders on 20 volumes of summary and that is progressing between correctives and pushes from the Provincial Court of Madrid. The ultra pseudo-union Clean Hands opened the path that Peinado is stumbling on, but the first complaints, which went unnoticed and came to nothing, landed a year earlier in the Madrid courts.
The wife of the President of the Government had been collaborating with the Complutense University of Madrid for more than five years when Pedro Sánchez won the 2018 motion of censure. The first information in media such as OkDiario about her degrees, her extraordinary professorship or her master’s degree came during the pandemic and approached the courts in the first months of 2023, when a lawyer asked the Complutense to justify why it had Begoña Gómez as collaborator.
The Complutense University, which has just appeared as an accusation against her, responded to this lawyer in the first months of that year with a closed defense of Gómez’s signing. She was placed in charge of the Competitive Social Transformation chair for “her training in social impact and competitive social transformation and for her proven professional experience.” The reasons, the center explained then, “are based on Begoña Gómez’s career, which fully coincides with the theme of the chair” after having begun their collaboration in 2012.
The University’s response ended up in the courts in different complaints signed by this lawyer on behalf of several different people, but always with the same objective: that Begoña Gómez and the rector Joaquín Goyache were charged. Two of the complaints were filed throughout 2023 and did not result in the opening of a case, due to not providing the necessary documentation or not paying the necessary bail. One was presented on behalf of the ultra channel Distrito TV and another by Pilar Baselga, a well-known conspiracy theorist who was denounced for spreading hoaxes such as the one about ‘Bar España’ or that Begoña Gómez is a transsexual woman.
Baselga returned to the fray in February 2024, represented by the same lawyer and with the same material: the suspicions of plugging and favoring treatment of Begoña Gómez in the Complutense. That complaint was signed on February 23, 2024, describing it as “grotesque” that they had created the chair and understood that the reason it had been set up was because she was “the wife of the President of the Government.” A complaint that died when Baselga abandoned the process for not paying bail, but they are the same arguments with which Peinado, months later, opened his own line of investigation.
By the time Clean Hands took Begoña Gómez to court in April 2024 with a complaint full of press clippings and a hoax, therefore, there were already more complaints and complaints against her, some dating back a year. And the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office had already been interested in them: a month before, the provincial prosecutor Pilar Rodríguez had asked her press team for information about Baselga’s complaint, sending a link from El Distrito announcing its filing. The media that, with the same lawyer, had also filed a complaint against Begoña Gómez for the same thing a year before.
That conversation between the provincial prosecutor and her team was captured on a post-it in her agenda, along with another note: “Manuel Becerra Restaurant.” Because several journalists had requested information about the judicial case investigating the tragedy at the Burro Canaglia restaurant a year earlier, when a fire caused two deaths. The Civil Guard decided that this note should be incorporated into the Supreme Court case, although it was unrelated, and has served for the right to spread the hoax that prosecutor Pilar Rodríguez and Begoña Gómez met in a restaurant to draw up a defense strategy in the face of the imminent opening of legal cases against her.
The supposed meeting for which the PP asks for explanations never existed, the restaurant in question had been burned for a year, and the documentation to which this newspaper has had access proves that the Prosecutor’s Office was gathering information about these first ultra complaints against Begoña Gómez. On March 13 of that year, the day the post-it was placed on the agenda, the chief prosecutor of Madrid, Almudena Lastra, explained in writing to the Attorney General’s Office in a statement of accounts what had happened with all those complaints “with identical content” against the president’s wife and her work at the Complutense. HazteOir, the ultra-Catholic organization that carries out the popular accusation against Begoña Gómez and the attorney general, has been the first to try to prosecute this hoax.
From the failed lawsuits to the Peinado cause
The first movements against Begoña Gómez came in 2023 with a joint strategy of a lawyer who requested information from the Complutense and, later, turned that information into complaints through an ultra media and a conspiracy talk show, but none of them crystallized into a court case. We had to wait for Juan Carlos Peinado to open proceedings at the request of Clean Hands, to give entry to all the ultra parties and organizations that requested it and to reach the same point: to investigate the work life of Begoña Gómez.
The case – its initial version – began when Miguel Bernad’s ultra organization presented a series of press reports accusing Begoña Gómez of favoring the businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés in million-dollar public awards with letters of recommendation, of intervening in the rescue of Air Europa, and finally a news item from The Objective that ambiguously stated that there was a subsidy in the name of Begoña Gómez: a Cantabrian hotelier with the same name as the president’s wife.
Peinado’s magnifying glass was not placed on the Complutense University and the decade of work that Gómez had developed there until weeks later, when the ultra-Catholic association HazteOir filed its own complaint but this time targeting his professorship and his master’s degree. The rector Goyache was finally charged and, as the months passed and new complaints from the extreme right, Begoña Gómez became triple investigated for her relationship with the Complutense: for supposedly obtaining the chair using her marriage to Pedro Sánchez, for appropriating software and, finally, because her assistant in Moncloa sent emails to her interlocutors at the University.
The Provincial Court has been filing these accusations while Peinado has adapted its proceedings until Begoña Gómez is on the brink of trial. The magistrates supervising the process lifted the rector’s accusation due to the “absence of objective incriminating data” against him. Peinado’s latest move, after having spoken out in the opposite direction less than a year ago, is to name the Complutense University of Madrid as an accusation. The same institution that two years ago, in response to the lawyer whose complaints opened the ban, defended Begoña Gómez’s collaborations tooth and nail.
Source: www.eldiario.es
