The defense of Begoña Gómez believes that any of the legal requirements are given to be seen before a jury if it comes to trial. Gómez’s lawyer, Antonio Camacho, has appealed that decision adopted a week ago by Judge Juan Carlos Peinado because, according to the defense, there is no crime of embezzlement (one of those provided by the law of the jury to be tried by this type of court), nor any of the three investigated (in addition to Gómez; his advisor Cristina Álvarez; and the current delegate of the government in the community of Madrid, Francisco Martín, Francisco Martín, of Secretary General of the Presidency) can be considered alleged author of that crime. Amazan, the imputation, according to Gomez’s lawyer, is not “plausible”, which is the third condition established by law to open a jury procedure.
The resource of the defense arrives after it was known that he concludes that the assistant of Pedro Sánchez’s wife interceded at a fortnight of sponsors of the chair that Gomez Codiregía at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). In the appeal presented now, the defense insists that Álvarez only sent some occasional email as a “favor” for the president’s wife because they were friends, which “can never be interpreted as a behavior” constituting a crime of embezzlement. “That behavior is very common and enters within social uses and interpreting that it could be constitutive of a embezzlement is only the result of an extraordinarily extensive interpretation of the Criminal Code,” says the defense.
During the year and a half that combs investigating the wife of the President of the Government, the judge has been expanding the crimes that imputes him, so that the initial accusation for influences and corruption in business has evolved to also add undue appropriation and intrusion for his professional activity with businessmen and the Complutense University. But, in addition, the instructor has opened a second line of investigation focused on investigating whether embezzlement was committed by hiring Álvarez to collaborate with the president’s wife in his “private activity” – a thesis that both have denied, like the Executive.
Gómez’s lawyer argues that there are neither facts that fit in a embezzlement nor does the condition of public official required that crime in Sánchez’s wife. The lawyer and former Minister Camacho recalls that the emails sent by Álvarez in the name of Gómez in which the judge justifies the imputation of embezzlement were framed in the chair of competitive social transformation and, although the president’s wife was the co -director, “she did not charge any amount” for that task. “In these circumstances, can it be estimated that this was a job or that he asked for that favor to benefit financially? We believe that this interpretation exceeds the principles that preside over the criminal law of advanced societies like ours,” says the defense.
The lawyer also supports the appeal in which one of the elements in which the judge bases the existence of embezzlement is the emails sent and received by Álvarez of the former vicerrector of the Complutense University Juan Carlos Dadrio, messages that were not provided to the defense until last Monday, five days after the instructor agreed to the transformation of the cause to the procedure.
Camacho also warns that the functions attributed to the assistants of the spouses of the government presidents “are fasting of any type of regulation, there is no rule that establishes what are the functions to be developed.” “There is no statute of the president’s spouse assistant who establishes what his powers are,” says the defense.
Gomez’s appeal joins another known on Tuesday by Cristina Álvarez, assistant of the wife of the president of the Government, also against the decision of the Judge Peinado that the trial for the alleged crime of embezzlement is celebrated with jury. Álvarez’s defense argues that the decision “disobeys” the criteria of the Provincial Court, which, according to the defense, denied “expressly and bluntly” that the assistant could have committed the crime of embezzlement and adds that there are no indications that point to it, reports Óscar López-Fonseca.
