The businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés, summoned to testify this Monday as a witness in the judicial case opened against Begoña Gómez, wife of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has explained that he has gone to the Moncloa on several occasions and that on one occasion he met there both the head of the Executive and his wife, according to sources present at the interrogation. These sources have added that Barrabés has not recognized any type of irregularity. For its part, Begoña Gómez’s defense, represented by the former socialist minister Antonio Camacho, maintains that during Barrabés’ statement no indication of criminality or anything that implicates his client, accused of influence peddling and corruption in business, has emerged.
At the end of Barrabés’ videoconference statement, which lasted just over half an hour, the prosecution – which includes Vox and the ultra-Catholic group Hazte Oír – said that the businessman had been “evasive”. According to these accusations, the witness did not provide many details, claiming that he did not remember them, but he did refer to those meetings in Moncloa. One of them was in the presence of Begoña Gómez; it was very short, he added, because Sánchez left to talk on the phone. In the other, according to sources present at the statement, he participated with other businessmen specialised in innovation and the wife of the head of the Executive was not present. According to defence sources, no one has asked Barrabés if he got those two meetings with Sánchez in La Moncloa thanks to the mediation of his wife. And sources from the PSOE insist that the President of the Government greets and meets with many businessmen regularly, and that this does not imply anything. The PP, however, speaks of a “scandal of unbearable proportions.”
“The Prime Minister knew everything. Why did he call it love when he meant corruption?” asked the PP spokesman, Borja Sémper, rhetorically. “It is shameful that someone who does business with the wife of the Prime Minister is received in La Moncloa by the Prime Minister himself. It is unbelievable. We expect an appearance by the President explaining what business is done in La Moncloa.”
The PSOE downplays the importance of these meetings at the Government headquarters. Socialist sources point out that Barrabés is one of the most important businessmen in his sector and that, therefore, it is normal that he meets with Sánchez; and they add that Begoña Gómez attended these meetings because they both knew each other from their work at the Complutense University (UCM). Barrabés, who suffers from a serious illness, participated as a professor in the master’s degree in Competitive Social Transformation of the chair that the president’s wife co-directed at the UCM.
The PSOE spokesperson, Esther Peña, has insisted that there is “nothing” in this case and has asked for the case to be closed. “If someone thinks it is wrong for the president of a country to hold meetings with businessmen, with the cultural community, with institutions… Well, it would not be a serious country like Spain. Therefore, let us leave these trivialities behind,” said Peña. The spokesperson has asserted that the case is based on a “false” accusation, a “personal attack” against Begoña Gómez for the mere fact of being the wife of a “progressive” president of the Government.
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The case opened by Judge Juan Carlos Peinado against Begoña Gómez faces a key week. The magistrate had summoned Barrabés to testify on Monday and plans to question Gómez on Friday. Peinado, who only bases his investigations on a complaint from the pseudo-union Manos Limpias and a complaint from the ultra-Catholic organisation Hazte Oír, wants to investigate “all the facts, acts, behaviours and conduct carried out and derived from the relationship existing” between the two. But he has not granted the two the same status: he has called Gómez as the accused (which allows her to appear with a lawyer and not answer questions, to guarantee her right to a defence); Barrabés, as a witness (which obliges him to answer all the parties, since it is assumed that the case is not against him).
This circumstance has generated suspicions in the defense of the president’s wife, who insists on her innocence and maintains that the judge is acting in an uncontrolled manner and is promoting a “universal investigation” against her. Along the same lines, the Prosecutor’s Office expressed its “uncertainty” regarding the “procedural drift” of the magistrate’s investigation, which it accuses of acting “without filter.” In fact, in an appeal sent to the Provincial Court of Madrid, the public prosecutor’s office exposed the striking situation of Barrabés in the case: he is “considered a witness” despite the fact that “the feeling is conveyed that he is the one under investigation, although it is not clear for what reason,” since the investigations “are pivoting around” him and the public contracts that were awarded to his companies. Neither the Prosecutor’s Office nor Gómez’s defense have asked Barrabés questions this Monday during his statement before Peinado, according to several sources.
Barrabés was summoned at 10:00 this Monday to testify by videoconference. The appearance of the businessman, who has been a witness (although the popular accusations are now considering whether to ask for his status to be changed to that of accused), occurs after the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard has prepared a second report that, like a previous one prepared in May, does not detect irregularities in the contracts awarded to Barrabés and placed under suspicion by the magistrate Juan Carlos Peinado. “In general terms, based on the information observed in the files, the preparation, start, processing, tendering, awarding, formalization and execution of the contracts – some of them currently in force – would have apparently developed normally and under the principles that govern public contracting,” emphasize the investigators of the armed institute.
The Civil Guard and the Public Prosecutor’s Office point out that this second exculpatory report was sent to the judge on July 2, three days before Begoña Gómez was to testify before Peinado on July 5. However, the parties did not have this analysis from the Civil Guard at that time and, in addition, the questioning of the president’s wife was suspended as soon as it began when it was found that she had not been notified of all the documentation of the case. Therefore, the magistrate ordered her to be summoned again for July 19.
Gomez’s statement
In anticipation of this appointment next Friday, extremist groups are trying to pressure the dean of the Plaza de Castilla judge, María Jesús del Barco, president of the conservative Professional Association of the Magistracy (APM), so that she does not approve the same “security” measures adopted on July 5, when Gómez’s first appearance took place. On that occasion, the president’s wife was able to enter the courts through the garage, thus avoiding the journalists stationed at the door. Hazte Oír, which called for demonstrations in front of the court that day, has asked the dean in writing not to adopt “extraordinary measures”, considering it “unequal treatment” and an attempt to “intimidate and coerce Peinado and the accusations, with a display of the force of the State at the service of the particular interests of the aforementioned.”
In this document, the organization goes so far as to say that Hazte Oír members are those who “fear being attacked by controlled or uncontrolled PSOE militants,” for which they rely, for example, on words spoken more than a century ago in the Cortes by the founder of said formation, Pablo Iglesias, who said that his party aspired to “the suppression of the judiciary, the suppression of the Church, the suppression of the army and the suppression of other institutions” in order to end “the social antagonisms” that existed at that time —although Hazte Oír omitted this second part of the phrase.
Following the questioning of Sánchez’s wife as a defendant, the judge also called as witnesses on Friday the current vice-rector for Planning, Coordination and Institutional Relations of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), José María Coello de Portugal, and his predecessor in the post, Juan Carlos Doadrio. The magistrate took this measure after the rector of the institution, Juan Goyache, testified on July 5 and denied the existence of irregularities in the relationship that Begoña Gómez has had with the Complutense, where she was in charge of a chair.
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