This is the story of a master’s degree, an advisor, and two letters. The story of the Complutense University, La Moncloa, and some Ibex-35 companies. Of a controversial judge and two years of charges against the wife of the Prime Minister. If, with this story, one had to write a narrative of proven facts for a conviction or an acquittal —considering the more than 5,000 pages (28 volumes of information) that make up the summary— it would be an arduous task. The version and vision of investigating judge Juan Carlos Peinado and Begoña Gómez regarding the latter’s conduct are diametrically opposed. Something that can be common in many cases. And something that is not so common: the three defense lawyers openly accuse the magistrate of lying and twisting the facts to fit the Penal Code. Furthermore, the lawyers prosecuting the case (the Public Prosecutor’s Office requests its dismissal) do not even agree on which crimes should go to trial and who should sit in the dock.
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Peinado has decided to conclude the investigation opened in April 2024 against Gómez, and to prosecute her along with two other people —her advisor at La Moncloa, Cristina Álvarez, and businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés— for four crimes: influence peddling, business corruption, misappropriation, and embezzlement. The proceedings contain complex technical knots regarding where the line lies between exerting undue influence and simply wearing the hat of the wife of a country’s leader. Or whether one can illegally appropriate a brand. And if you add to this the intention that the legal tangle be resolved by nine ordinary citizens, laypeople in law, the hypothetical first trial against Pedro Sánchez’s wife could be a conundrum difficult to compare.
In the background, for the first time, an interesting, or self-interested, debate emerges about what role the spouse of a Prime Minister should play and how much and in what way they can carry out their private activities while their husband sits in La Moncloa. Beyond the questioned manner in which Judge Peinado has conducted this investigation, these are the elements that could go to trial:
Influence Peddling
A crime committed by someone who, taking advantage of their position, induces an authority or official to adopt a resolution for their own benefit or that of a third party.
Peinado maintains that Gómez’s status as the “wife of” the Prime Minister opened doors for her that would otherwise never have opened. For example, with the creation on October 30, 2020, of an extraordinary professorship at the Complutense University, from which a master’s degree with the same name hung: Competitive Social Transformation. The judge attributes this alleged influence to the mere position of being Sánchez’s wife. There are no messages or witnesses who speak of specific pressures. Peinado relies on the fact that the university rector, Joaquín Goyache, was summoned to La Moncloa in July 2020 and that three months later this professorship was created, which Gómez began to co-direct (she could not be the sole director because there had to be someone from the university, so the other co-director was José Manuel Ruano de la Fuente). He supports his thesis with the statement of the then vice-rector of the same university, Juan Carlos Doadrio, who indicated that the creation was not irregular, but that he had never seen the existence of a professorship directed by a person without a higher degree, like Gómez. Some popular accusations privately add that they do not understand why Doadrio is not also investigated if he was the one who facilitated the creation of said professorship.
The truth is that Begoña Gómez had been working with the Complutense since 2014, co-directing a master’s degree in Public and Private Fundraising, when Sánchez was not Prime Minister. She declared that if the meeting was held at La Moncloa, it was because the university facilities were closed due to the pandemic and it was “natural” for it to be at her home. In a cafeteria, it would not have been easy for someone who goes “with significant security apparatus,” her defense argued.
At the origin of the professorship, Peinado also implicates businessman and consultant Juan Carlos Barrabés. Both met in June 2019 at a sustainability event, and the case includes an email from a few months later (December 12, 2019) in which Gómez tells him: “Dear Carlos: please fill out this sheet today that they are asking me for at the university to present the master’s degree. A hug.” For the magistrate, this makes Barrabés a key piece in “the creation, financing, development, and consolidation of said professorship.” They were not “isolated contacts,” but rather, he argues, he “projected the academic design” and the training program.
And here the letters come in. During that period, in July 2020, a company belonging to Barrabés (Innova Next) competed with another in a public tender from an entity attached to the Ministry of Digital Transformation. During the processing of the procedure, Begoña Gómez, as co-director of the professorship, sent two letters of support for the project. Barrabés’s company later secured the award of both contracts (one on July 20, 2021, for a value of 7.7 million euros and another on August 2 of the same year for 4.4 million). The reality is that in addition to Gómez, there were another thirty letters from major tech companies such as IBM or Microsoft, and also from the Madrid City Council, an administration governed by the PP and which had awarded public contracts to Barrabés’s company in 2017. This matter is also being analyzed by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is why Barrabés argues that he cannot be investigated in one place and another for the same facts. In this institution, which depends on Luxembourg, the Tax Agency has presented a report that detects “adulterated” elements in the technical part of the offer.
Barrabés denies that the letters helped with the award and that he was involved in the creation of the professorship. He says that his track record in innovation and digitalization processes supports Gómez asking him to teach two classes (one in each course for two years), for which he charged 150 euros. “More than 20 other professors did the same,” he argues. And he recalls that his companies did not contribute a single euro to set up the professorship, unlike others. These extraordinary professorships, by definition, are financed with money from collaborating companies. For example, for the creation of private master’s degrees and studies related to tourism, one can be created financed by hotel entrepreneurs. Gómez’s received capital from Reale Seguros (with 60,000 euros at once) and from Fundación La Caixa (which committed to giving 15,000 euros annually). But that money goes to the University’s assets.
For Luis Pardo, the lawyer for the political party Iustitia Europa, which is a party to the proceedings, this crime is the most serious in the case. “I know it’s complicated to see, but no one would have obtained that professorship without being the president’s wife. Politically it is reprehensible, and criminally there are indications of influence peddling,” he argues. Lawyer Javier Melero, experienced in corruption trials, believes, on the other hand, that Begoña Gómez is not in a legal position to pressure anyone in the Administration. “She is not in a position to influence any official, much less one of that category [rector]. It’s another thing if officials are sycophants and want to please the president’s wife. In any case, moral pressure is very ugly, but it is not a crime.”
Influence peddling must also involve a benefit, and Begoña Gómez’s lawyer has grown tired of repeating in his writings that the professorship was unpaid and that she only earned about 15,000 euros annually for her work on the master’s degree. Peinado resolves this by asserting that the professorship “served as a means of professional development” and that, furthermore, “the benefit can be indirect and in favor of a third party,” although he does not detail how.
Business Corruption
This refers to corruption between private individuals that punishes directors, administrators, employees, or collaborators of a company who seek to obtain unfair competitive advantages.
Peinado details under this criminal offense a list of meetings that the president’s wife had over the years, mainly to develop a software with which she wanted small and medium-sized companies to be able to check if they met sustainable objectives. “It has been proven,” he says, “that she held different meetings with high-ranking officials from large companies to reach agreements on financing.” Representatives from Indra, Telefónica, and Google, whose then-leaders (Marc Murtra, José María Álvarez-Pallete, and Miguel Escassi) Gómez met with to implement her platform, have passed through the court.
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For the judge, it is crucial that no one from the Complutense was present at these meetings, and he supports his narrative with the testimony of Manuel Ausaverri, an Indra executive, who said that collaborations “of that nature” were “not common.” Begoña Gómez’s lawyer is very clear on this point: how can there be corruption if the money was destined for the Complutense, and how can it fit into corruption between private individuals if the university is a public entity?
The curious thing is that even the lawyer for the pseudo-union Manos Limpias, which filed the initial complaint against Sánchez’s wife, agrees here. “My client is concerned about the proper continuation of the procedure. He wants this to be done as well as possible so that when we reach the end of the procedure, we have a conviction, but in terms of justice and that it is legally possible,” states lawyer Víctor Soriano in a phone conversation. “These people have committed a series of crimes, but not the entire Penal Code. It would make no sense to accuse them of crimes that we believe they did not commit,” he continues. They do not see business corruption, nor misappropriation, nor do they believe the advisor should sit in the dock. They maintain that there are criminal indications against Sánchez’s wife, for whom they have just requested more than ten years in prison, but they believe the investigation should continue to clarify, for example, on whom she allegedly exerted her influence.
Misappropriation
When a person receives money, effects, or movable property belonging to others with the obligation to return them, but incorporates them into their own assets with intent to profit.
This element has been one of the most confusing during the proceedings. It concerns how the brand “Transformación Social y Competitiva” (name of the professorship and master’s degree), the website domain with the same name (transformatsc.org), and the aforementioned software that was to be hosted on that domain were registered. Peinado maintains that Gómez “acted de facto as the main project manager” and registered it in her name, “diverting the asset towards her own interests to the detriment” of the University. Gómez’s defense details that she only registered the brand logo in March 2020 and took charge of the domain (registering it for 25 euros annually) because she was told at the university that they did not register such elements there. “A term she invented, which did not exist before,” and which she registered “to prevent it from being incorrectly used,” she argued. In fact, the director of another professorship appeared and corroborated this.
The software could indeed be registered in a Complutense office where knowledge is transferred so that it can reach companies, and there are emails in which those in charge explain how to do it. But Gómez never registered it because “according to the regulations […] it could only be registered when the project was finished (with source codes and fulfilled requirements), a stage that was not reached due to the elimination of the professorship.” The university, which rescinded Gómez’s professorship in September 2024 after the start of the procedure, has appeared as a private prosecution because, it claims, it learned about the entire software matter from the press.
In any case, the legal discussion regarding this crime is broader, as the defenses argue that misappropriation can only affect money, valuable effects, or movable property, and not a brand. “A brand is not susceptible to appropriation,” they say. The lawyer for the ultracatholic association Hazte Oír, which leads the private prosecution, does not see it that way: “The software is an asset susceptible to economic exploitation, and the brand and domain are part of ‘a network of registrations’ to ensure control of that asset,” notes Javier María Pérez-Roldán.
Embezzlement
When a public authority or official, acting with intent to profit, misappropriates or improperly uses public money entrusted to them due to their position.
Finally, the advisor. “The evidence provisionally supports that the investigated Begoña Gómez requested, accepted, and consistently took advantage of the dedication of an employee paid by the Presidency for tasks unrelated to the institutional purpose of the position,” reads the judge’s latest brief. The question is whether Cristina Álvarez, Gómez’s assistant since 2018, dedicated herself to helping the president’s wife with her private duties related to the professorship and the software and, therefore, whether money from her employment was diverted. The magistrate maintains that she did, and for this reason, has called university staff who dealt with the advisor to testify and has requested emails and communications that are supposed to link her to the shadow of the professorship’s structure. Álvarez’s lawyer specifies the figures in his appeals: “He is only able to identify (in eight years since my client has been Doña Begoña’s assistant) ten events that [Álvarez] attended. Ten events in eight years mean an average of 1.25 events per year. What a scandal!” He adds that some were on weekends, such as an awards ceremony. “Is it embezzlement to attend an event on a Sunday where a friend is going to be awarded?” he asks.
The magistrate also relies on 121 emails provided by Vice-Rector Doadrio about the professorship, in 21 of which Álvarez appears. The advisor’s lawyer insists that it was a “specific task” by his client that, in no case, affected the work for which she was hired, and adds, furthermore, that even if embezzlement existed, she, in any case, could not have been a participant in that crime. As an example: in 1994, the Supreme Court convicted a mayor, a deputy mayor, and a councilor for the illicit use of a bailiff for private purposes. The bailiff was not even investigated; in 2014, the high court sentenced the mayor of Paiporta for using various city officials for cleaning and construction work at her private chalet. The officials were not investigated; and in 2018, the same chamber convicted the director of a public consortium for using a trusted employee as his driver and assistant for private activities. The latter was also not investigated. “My client could be the object of the crime (even a victim), but never the perpetrator,” the lawyer states.
Without delving into the merits of the matter, lawyer Jaime Campaner, a criminal lawyer also accustomed to corruption cases, points out that it must be proven that the services were rendered during working hours, ceasing to provide services to the public administration for that reason. “One must not fall into the temptation of confusing potential incompatibilities or the eventual decorum of a certain conduct with its criminal nature,” he stresses. Melero adds that it would be necessary to establish a “comparative line with other wives of other Prime Ministers” to determine whether it is “a gross deviation or something minor that compromises a moral plane.”
Next week, the prosecution and defense must present their conclusions and appeals regarding this latest step by the judge. The Provincial Court has been endorsing the core of the investigation (it refused to dismiss the case at the outset and accepted the addition of the crime of embezzlement), so its decisions in the coming months will be decisive in determining whether Begoña Gómez will go to trial or not. Her lawyer, Antonio Camacho, leaves a reflection in his writings whenever he can: “If we investigate for embezzlement all public officials who dedicate more than half a minute a day of their working hours to private tasks, even those of their superiors, we would have to instruct the most voluminous mega-case in our history,” he has written. “If we add to this the absence of regulation and clarity regarding the limits of assistance to the wife of the Prime Minister, where the boundary between public and private blurs because she is a wife 24 hours a day, it is easy to understand the disproportionate nature of the investigation.”