The inspector zeal of PP and Vox came across again this morning in the Madrid Assembly with the responses of the Complutense University officials cited to shed light on the alleged favorable treatment of Begoña Gómez, wife of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, as co-director of an extraordinary chair at the Complutense University.
While the right cannot agree on a possible summons from Sánchez himself, the Assembly’s investigative commission still does not have evidence of the accusation, nor statements that cast serious doubts about the correctness of Gómez’s teaching career, which began years ago. before her husband’s arrival at Moncloa. “There is no doubt about the legality,” said the vice-rector for Planning, Coordination and Institutional Relations, José María Coello de Portugal Martínez del Peral, in a sentence that summarizes the content of the session.
Coello, present at the request of the PP, began by saying that it would be an “honor” for him to answer the questions, but his answer was almost always the same: the mixed commission to monitor the extraordinary chair of Corporate Social Transformation that Gómez co-directed, held in July and chaired by him, did not analyze its activity because the activity report had not been presented in a timely manner, and it could not be received at the same event, as Gómez herself had proposed. “The control capacity was left empty of content,” he said, and since the matter was already in court, out of “prudence” it was not possible to do further analysis. Between questions he made sure to cite the regulatory provisions according to which his actions were exactly correct at all times.
The vice-rector for Lifelong Training, Employability and Entrepreneurship, Concepción García, intervened at the request of the PSOE, which wanted her to clarify why the two master’s degrees managed by the extraordinary chair were suppressed, in one case, or suspended, in the other – in fact a title of its own financed by private companies—from Gómez when its demand was similar to that of others that remain operational. García responded that in addition to the decrease in demand, “public opinion” and the “discredit” associated with the name of the degree since it began to appear in the press and was investigated by a court also had an influence.
Gómez’s “extended and diversified experience” in 2013
García did refer to one of the elements that PP and Vox most point to as an indication of favored treatment, such as the fact that Gómez co-directed her own degree without having a university degree herself. In that sense, he recalled that, in a 2013 report, the director of the master’s degree in fundraising already praised Gómez’s “extensive and diversified experience” in the subject as an element that justified his co-direction of the degree, which over the years would pass to be under the umbrella of the questioned extraordinary professorship.
More Madrid, for its part, followed the appearances with skeptical distance. “It seems to me that questioning academic decisions at political headquarters is not the most logical, nor the most positive, nor the most respectful,” said deputy Daniel Varela, after confirming after the interventions of the first two appearing parties that the administrative procedures of the Complutense “are rigorous.” But the same interventions served the PP to conclude the opposite: that the chair was “arbitrary,” in the words of parliamentarian Ignacio Catalá.
The difference of opinions reaches the extreme in the case of Vox, which once again denounced the existence of a “plot” with Pedro Sánchez at the center, with indications as solid as that the School of Government on which the extraordinary chair depends had first responsible for the thesis director of Pablo Iglesias, founder of Podemos, when he was a doctoral student. This was stated by the representative Ana Cuartero in front of the scared face of the manager of the aforementioned school, María José Sánchez.
The manager dared, on the other hand, to suggest to the PP deputy Mercedes Zarzalejo that an irregular expense to buy a microphone and pay a sound technician to broadcast an event of the chair over the Internet did not necessarily hide an operation of fractionation of contracts. The session ended shortly after. The next one will be held next week and then there will be a break until February.
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