Judge Juan Carlos Peinado has dismissed the appeals filed by Begoña Gómez, her advisor in Moncloa Cristina Álvarez, and businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés against his decision to refer the case to a jury if it finally goes to trial, while again rejecting the dismissal of the investigation for the crimes of influence peddling, corruption in private sector business, embezzlement, and misappropriation of public funds in relation to the chair held by the wife of the Prime Minister at the Complutense University of Madrid.
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In an order, the head of the Madrid Investigative Court No. 41 confirms the transformation of the case into a summary procedure, as a preliminary step to the oral trial, and insists on sending the defendants to a trial by popular jury.
This resolution can still be appealed before the Madrid Provincial Court, where the prosecution already appealed the indictment agreed by Peinado on April 11.
According to the judge’s order, Gómez relied on a personal relationship with the Prime Minister, and he with the rest of the administration. According to Peinado, this relationship facilitated “access, thanks to that position, to institutionally exceptional interlocutions.”
The magistrate holds that the mere status of “wife of” would have served to influence, “and all this with the added fact of having held meetings in Moncloa” to organize the chair.
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The resolution states that the facts indicatively attributed to Pedro Sánchez’s wife “could have meant that, since her husband first arrived at the General Secretariat of the PSOE and, above all, at the Presidency of the Government, certain public decisions favorable to the chair and the TSC project were made, which could have been obtained through a singular exploitation of her relational position.”
Peinado cites his order of April 11 to reiterate the indications against the accused and thus repeats his reference, when addressing the alleged influence peddling, that to find behaviors similar to those attributed to Pedro Sánchez’s wife “more typical of absolutist regimes,” one would have to go back to the reign of Fernando VII.
The judge considers that the procedure should fall under a jury court because the crime of influence peddling would be committed “to perpetrate or facilitate the execution of the others, and if they were investigated or judged separately, the continuity of the case would be broken” and denies that other crimes charged, outside the jury law, are more serious.
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