Sánchez And Corruption Redux
Begoña Gómez hasn't been sent for trial and it's a funny kind of embezzlement she's accused of
1.
It’s being widely reported this morning that Begoña Gómez, the wife of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, has been sent for trial on embezzlement charges. Here’s Euractiv citing AFP; you can easily find other similar reports circulating.
The reports are not true. Judge Juan Carlos Peinado has ruled that if she is sent for trial, it will be before a jury. That’s all. Of course, he may well decide to send the case to trial at some point, but we are not there yet. If he does, she will be able to appeal that decision.
Profound legal expertise isn’t necessary to see that these stories are wrong; the ability to read Spanish suffice, for example, this tweet from the lawyer of Gómez’s secretary makes it clear.
2.
What comes to mind when you hear the word “embezzlement”? To me it suggests that a senior public official or minister has been skimming public funds into his or her own pocket on a considerable scale.
So, is that what the judge is accusing her of?
No. He is accusing her of using her publicly funded secretary for private purposes, i.e., sending emails and handling private admin tasks on her behalf.
The “embezzled” money would thus be the value of the secretary’s time not spent assisting Gómez in her official role. That is what Judge Peinado is trying to pin on Gómez, her secretary, and the Delegado del Gobierno en la Comunidad de Madrid (the central government’s representative in the Madrid region).
Not exactly what most people think of as looting the state.
3.
As I argued in Sánchez and Corruption, this is also where the foreign-media doom loop kicks in: a half-understood story in the Spanish press gets picked up abroad, stripped of context, and then bounces back into Spain as if it were independent confirmation of Sánchez’s corruption. Each cycle magnifies the distortion, until a procedural ruling is inflated into “proof” of systemic rot at the very top of government.