The Court of First Instance number 8 of Marbella has acquitted elDiario.es of the lawsuit filed by the mayor of the town, Ángeles Muñoz, who demanded 50,000 euros from this media for an alleged violation of her right to honor committed through the publication of eleven articles. Muñoz must pay the costs of the procedure.
Judge Luna González Pinto has ruled that the information to which the mayor alluded in her lawsuit has “public interest”, as defended by the Prosecutor’s Office in the trial held on September 10. The judge assures that, through the documentary evidence, as well as the statement during the hearing of the journalist who signed most of the information, it has been proven that all of them were “scrupulously verified.”
elDiario.es revealed on October 23, 2022 that a stepson of the mayor and her husband had been prosecuted by the National Court in a case for drug trafficking and money laundering. From that news, based on the indictment to which this newspaper had access, elDiario.es undertook an investigation into the judicial case in the National Court, which was expanded to other extremes of the action of the Government of Ángeles Muñoz, to the alleged interference in it by his relatives prosecuted for drug trafficking and money laundering, and also to his enormous capital after 30 years dedicated exclusively to politics.
One of the pieces of information that Muñoz considered had violated his right to honor was published on October 24 of 2022 under the headline ‘The stepson of the mayor of Marbella, prosecuted for drug trafficking: “The city is ours, the Junta… fucking Andalusia”’. The information included the telephone interventions that the Unit against Economic and Fiscal Crime (UDEF) of the Police had carried out with judicial authorization on Joakim Broberg, still pending trial and under whom the Prosecutor’s Office accuses him of 25 years in prison. .
Subsequently, elDiario.es published that the Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s Office and the Investigative Court number 6 of the National Court They had ignored three reports in which the UDEF requested that a new line of investigation be opened that aimed to investigate possible corruption around Ángeles Muñoz.
According to the lawsuit filed by Mayor Muñoz against this media, its journalists had “seriously attacked the honor, personal dignity and image” of the Marbella councilor, attributing to her “acts with a criminal appearance and behaviors that are considered seriously dishonest by society.” , all with manifest contempt for the truth and the undisguised intention of harming it both personally and politically.”
None of that happened, according to the resolution of the Court filing Muñoz’s lawsuit. “The veracity of the information contained in the contested publications has been proven, since it is confirmed that the relatives of today’s plaintiff were immersed in a judicial investigation,” Judge González Pinto decides. “As proven by the evidence, also through the testimony of Pedro Águeda Moreno, the information had been scrupulously verified. Consequently, it is not appropriate to agree to any rectification, dismissing the claim in its entirety,” adds the judge.
Citation from a journalist
Ángeles Muñoz’s attempts to intimidate elDiario.es now extend to criminal proceedings, once the civil lawsuit has failed. The Investigative Court number 4 of Marbella, at the request of the mayor of the town, has summoned the journalist of this medium to testify as an investigator. Pedro Agueda for an alleged crime of revealing secrets.
Muñoz’s complaint alludes to two pieces of information signed by the aforementioned journalist. One of them deals with the participation of the mayor’s husband, now deceased, in the awarding of some works to a friend of his, another Swedish businessman also prosecuted in the case of drug trafficking and money laundering at the National Court. The second information portrays the system of media clientelism and possible diversion of funds developed during Muñoz’s mandate.
The two pieces of information are based on emails from an address that belonged to the mayor and that were attached to a complaint for various corruption crimes filed in 2017 with the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. The Marbella prosecutor who opened investigation proceedings cites those two emails in his archiving decree. The prosecutor concluded that the events could cause “discomfort” but either they did not constitute a crime or the statute of limitations had expired.
The Marbella Investigative Court that has summoned the elDiario.es journalist as an investigation had previously taken his statement as a witness. In that first statement, the journalist explained that he never had access to all of Muñoz’s emails and that he only cited in his information those that included the judicial documents, referring to events that have nothing to do with Muñoz’s life and that were of total public relevance.
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