Bolaños, on the appointment of Judge Peinado for the Begoña Gómez case: "I will be there and I will try to be useful"

MadridJudge Juan Carlos Peinado has made a new move in the case against Begoña Gómez and has opened a separate investigation into the hiring of the advisor to the wife of the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez. The judge wants to determine whether "the commission of a crime of embezzlement" can be inferred from the hiring of Cristina Álvarez, who is one of those under investigation, along with Gómez, in the case for alleged crimes of influence peddling and corruption in the businesses she is instructing. Within the framework of this separate investigation, Peinado summoned the Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts, Félix Bolaños, to testify on April 16 at 10:30 a.m. At the end of July, the Spanish president already came face to face with Juan Carlos Peinado, who has been at war with the Spanish executive for months.

This Tuesday, in statements to the corridors of the Senate, Bolaños has shown himself willing to attend the summons. "I will be there and I will try to be useful," he said in statements to the media, although he was surprised by the summons. The judge justifies the summons by the fact that Bolaños must clarify the hiring of Begoña Gómez's advisor at Moncloa, who is under suspicion in the judicial case. In December, his advisor, when he was still just a witness, declared that he sent several emails related to the object of the investigation, which is Gómez's activity as former co-director of a chair at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). According to Peinado's thesis and the popular accusations made by far-right parties and entities, Sánchez's wife would have used her position in Moncloa to favor her collaborator at the UCM, Juan Carlos Barrabés, who is also investigated for having been awarded public contracts.

Peinado's decision comes after former Vice-Secretary of the Presidency Alfredo González Gómez stated, in a statement also as a witness at the end of February, that he had on the table, when Sánchez arrived at Moncloa in 2018, a list of between 80 and 90 candidates for each position. Among that list of names was that of Álvarez, who he said he did not know previously. He also could not say who gave him the list and assured that he limited himself to submitting the proposal to hire Gómez's advisor to his superior, who clarified, in response to questions from the popular accusations, that it was precisely Félix Bolaños when he was in charge of the general secretariat of the Presidency between July 2012 and the same month.

As with Sánchez, Peinado intends to go to the minister's office to take his statement. Although the criminal procedure law states that the president and members of the government are exempt from testifying in person and can choose to do so in writing, in the summons Peinado rejects that Bolaños can avail himself of this exception because the events "happened when he was the general secretary of the Presidency of the government" and not a minister.

In fact, this is what Pedro Sánchez tried at the time, but it did not go ahead because Judge Peinado refused. Then the Spanish president invoked his right not to testify before the magistrate and filed a complaint, which ended in nothing, for prevarication.

Sources from the Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes explain that they have learned of the summons through the media, but make it clear that Bolaños "will answer, in his capacity as a witness, any question that is put to him." The minister does not have the same right not to testify as Sánchez. If the head of the executive was able to do so it was because the criminal procedure law exempts him from testifying against his spouse. And in this case the person under investigation is his wife, Begoña Gómez.