Judge Juan Carlos Peinado has demanded that Begoña Gómez, wife of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, justify within five days that she used the passport only for the trip that the court itself had authorized, that is, to fly to the United Kingdom for her daughter’s graduation.
Read more Trump threatens to “take over” the Strait of Hormuz and “manage it”
Since there are no entry or exit stamps in the passport, he asks her to provide evidence that she made that trip and warns her that if she does not prove it or it is understood that she violated the precautionary measures, the facts could constitute a crime of breach of precautionary measure.
Gómez, accused of four crimes for co-directing a chair at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), personally handed over her passport on Sunday after Peinado authorized her to make the trip, once he had ordered the passport to be withdrawn due to flight risk.
Sánchez’s wife had requested to be able to travel with her husband to the NATO summit in Turkey, but the judge rejected it considering that it increased the risk that she would not return to Spain since there is no such close police cooperation.
Also read
The magistrate had authorized her to travel to London from July 8 to 10 due to “the good judicial cooperation relationship between Spain and the United Kingdom, even after Brexit, as well as the nature of the event to be attended.”
Read more French politics, including the far right, censors Rajoy’s comment about ‘les bleus’
“Regarding the applicant’s attendance at the NATO summit, to which she is invited for reasons of international institutional courtesy, without having an active role in said summit, since, as some of the writings presented by the accusations have highlighted, Turkey does not belong to the European Union’s area of freedom, security, and justice, in which police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters is facilitated by its institutional structure, it is deemed appropriate to maintain the precautionary decision whose modification has been requested,” the judge stated.
Peinado issued an order at the end of June to open a trial against Begoña Gómez with a popular jury for the alleged crimes of embezzlement, influence peddling, corruption in business, and misappropriation in the UCM chair case. In addition, he took precautionary measures. He ordered Gómez to hand over the passport to the court, prohibited her from traveling abroad, and imposed the obligation to appear in court every 15 days.
All of Peinado’s decisions have been appealed before the Provincial Court of Madrid, which has several appeals pending resolution. Today, the five magistrates of the section that reviews Peinado’s decisions met to deliberate on the magistrate’s decision that a popular jury court should handle the prosecution of Gómez, her advisor, Cristina Álvarez, and businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés.
Furthermore, the appeal against the indictment for the four crimes and the one filed against the precautionary measures set for Pedro Sánchez’s wife and her advisor are yet to be resolved.
