Begoña Gómez signs Josep Pujol's lawyer for the jury trial

MadridAfter the Madrid Court has endorsed that she be tried by a jury –despite the fact that he has removed two charges and returned his passport– and that Hazte Oír has requested thirteen years in prison for her, Begoña Gómez shakes up the board and, according to sources close to the matter, has decided to change lawyers. In this way, she dismisses the lawyer who has defended her throughout the entire two-year investigation, Antonio Camacho, and signs Jaime Campaner, who is also Josep Pujol Ferrusola's lawyer.

It will not be the first media case that Jaime Campaner is dealing with. He defends, for example, the footballer Rafa Mir, who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for a crime of sexual assault and another of injuries. In addition, he was the expert to whom the Board of Directors of Barça, chaired by Joan Laporta, turned to seek advice in the legal dispute against Josep Maria Bartomeu in light of the report forensic. He has also been the lawyer for the former first lady of Peru and the well-known devil's advocate, who defended –among others– the Iraqi Saddam Hussein or the Serbian Slobodan Milošević.

Eleven years ago, he published his thesis: The confession preceded by the unconstitutional obtaining of evidence. And, with the second edition, the person in charge of writing the prologue was Manuel Marchena. A Law graduate from the University of the Balearic Islands, he was the best of his year and holds a Master's degree in International Economic Criminal Law from the University of Granada and a doctorate cum laude in Procedural Law by the Complutense University of Madrid. He is also an academician of the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation of Spain and a member of the advisory committee of the International Research Center for Criminal Sciences at the University of Munich.

Takes over from Antonio Camacho, who took up the defense of Pedro Sánchez's wife in April 2024, when Judge Juan Carlos Peinado began investigating her for business corruption and influence peddling. Camacho was Minister of the Interior under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero from July to December 2011, a position he held after the resignation of Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba and after having been his number two as Secretary of State for Security since 2004. Later, during the first three years of Mariano Rajoy's legislature, he was a PSOE deputy in Congress.

The change of lawyer for Begoña Gómez comes 24 hours after Pedro Sánchez once again defended her innocence and denounced again that she is the victim of a “political cause”. “With this strategy, people who have a past of integrity and professionalism, and who have even sacrificed a good part of their professional development simply because I am president of the Spanish government, are dehumanized,” he said. And he justified that his wife left the company where she had been working for ten years when he arrived at Moncloa to “avoid any conflict of interest” and “any problem that might arise, even if it were artificial and intentional”.

The “original sin” of the Pujol case

During the trial of the Pujol case, which was submitted for sentencing two months ago, Jaime Campaner was one of the lawyers who highlighted the influence of Operation Catalonia on the genesis of the investigation. During the preliminary hearings, last November, he presented the front page of El Mundo with the screenshot about the fortune of the Pujol family in Andorra as the “original sin” of the case and presented it as a “bank striptease”. He also denounced that the evidence was obtained in an “unconstitutional and criminal” manner and alluded to the role of José Manuel Villarejo: “There are rational indications of the participation of individuals linked to state power”.