Public prosecutors in Madrid have lodged a direct appeal before the Provincial Audience over the decision by the judge of Madrid Court No 41, Juan Carlos Peinado, to open preliminary proceedings against Begoña Sánchez, the wife of Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, for alleged crimes of influence peddling and corruption in the private sector. The case is in the hands of Peinado's court, which admitted the complaint by the far right-linked civil servants' group Manos Limpias ("Clean Hands"), with the case registered on April 9th, in a period of only five working days and without consulting the public prosecutors, an aspect which is considered highly unusual. The court decision to admit the case is dated April 16th but the prosecutor's office was not notified until yesterday. The prosecutors request the revocation of the processing carried out so far and the shelving of the case.
As it is a direct appeal, the prosecutor's office has presented its demand to the Madrid Audience, the provincial appeal court, without the process passing through the investigating judge Juan Carlos Peinado, who opened the case in less than a week after Manos Limpias filed its complaint. The prosecutor's office argues that there is no evidence of a crime that would justify the opening of criminal proceedings, sources close to the case have told the EFE news agency.
False information in the complaint
Manos Limpias presented a seven-page brief that did not include any evidence, but rather only compiled the information published in two digital newspapers, ESdiario and El Confidencial. This Thursday, the complainant acknowledged in a statement that its complaint against Begoña Gómez is based solely on journalistic information and admits that this information may be false, but exempts itself from any responsibility. The president of Manos Limpias, Miguel Bernard, reported that he became aware "through several digital newspapers, of certain information that affirmed alleged irregularities, which could be allegedly criminal", and that seeing that the prosecutor's office "was not acting ex officio" on the matter, he decided to lodge a complaint so that a court could verify its veracity. "It will now be the judge who have to check whether these journalistic reports are true or not", he acknowledged. Of the eight press clippings that make up the complaint, to which ElNacional.cat has had access, one has turned out to be false. It is a news story published on April 7th in digital newspaper The Objective, which was in turn reported by the Telemadrid channel. Only two days later, this Madrid broadcaster retracted the information because it could not confirm its veracity.
The civil servants collective Manos Limpias is a body with a "trade union" structure, founded in 1995 by Miguel Bernad, which has lodged all kinds of complaints against what it considers political or economic corruption cases where damages have been done to the general interest. Bernard was secretary general of the Frente Nacional ("National Front"), which like its predecessor Fuerza Nueva ("New Force") was a far-right political party during Spain's democratic transition. In 2016, in connection with the work of Manos Limpias, he was initially sentenced to four years' prison for a continuing crime of extortion and another of fraud. More recently, the Supreme Court acquitted both Bernad, and the leader of the Association of Users of Banking Services (Ausbanc), Luis Pineda, who had been sentenced to 8 and 4 years in prison, respectively, by the National Audience for extortion of banks in exchange for preventing legal actions or campaigns of discredit against them.