The president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, said this Wednesday that he will reflect on whether he will resign from his position, after his wife Begoña Gómez was denounced for alleged corruption.
“I need to stop and reflect” on “whether I should continue as head of the government or renounce this high honor,” the president said in a letter to citizens published on the social network X.
Sánchez, in power since 2018, indicated that he will appear “before the media (…) next Monday, April 29” to announce his decision, and until then he canceled his public agenda.
The question that arises here is why the wife of the President of the Government of Spain was denounced.
The preliminary investigation into Gómez, due to suspicions of influence peddling and corruption, was opened on April 16 following a complaint from Clean Hands, a group close to the extreme right, as announced this Wednesday by the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid.
The proceedings are “secret,” the court indicated.
Sánchez, re-elected by Parliament in November, rejected the complaint, which in his opinion is based on “non-existent” facts, and framed it in a “strategy of harassment and demolition” against him by “media with a marked right-wing orientation and far-right.”
“I’m not naive. “I am aware that they are denouncing Begoña not because she has done something illegal (…), but because she is my wife,” Sánchez wrote.
They investigate Pedro Sánchez’s wife
The court’s decision was known after the digital media El Confidencial revealed this Wednesday that Investigators were examining Gómez’s ties to the Spanish tourism group Globalia, owner of the airline Air Europa.when the latter was in talks with the government to obtain a rescue during the covid-19 pandemic.
At that time, Gómez directed the IE Africa Center, a foundation related to the Instituto de Empresa (IE) business school, a position he left in 2022.
El Confidencial stated that the IE Africa Center signed a sponsorship agreement with Globalia in 2020 and that the wife of the head of Government “met privately with the CEO of the tourist holding company, Javier Hidalgo, in the company’s own offices. ”.
In November 2020, the Sánchez Government offered an aid line of 475 million euros to Air Europa, arising from a fund of 10,000 million euros intended to support strategic companies in difficulties due to the pandemic.
The Spanish company was the first of many others to benefit from that fund.
“Trumpist practices”
After the publication of the letter, the Popular Party (PP, right), the main opposition party, asked Sánchez “to appear now to give a reasoned explanation of the scandals surrounding his party, his Government and his partner.” instead of “disappearing” until Monday.
The president is betting “on victimization and pity instead of accountability and clarity,” the PP stressed in a message on X, implying that his threat could be a simple political strategy.
People around Sánchez came out to defend him, such as the number three in the Government, Teresa Ribera, who wrote in X: “We have a first-class president. Neither he nor his family deserve this.”
Hours earlier, the number two in the Government, María Jesús Montero, had described the complaint against Sánchez’s wife as “Trumpist practices.”
The PP uses “a false complaint from a far-right organization to defame and insult the presidency of the Government,” he indicated.
Clean hands
Clean Hands, founded in 1995, has been behind several lawsuits in recent years and has acted as a civil party in many corruption cases.
It is considered close to the extreme right, among other things, due to the personality of its founder, Miguel Bernad, former leader of the National Front party, dissolved in 1993.
Accused of participating in an extortion ring, Bernad was sentenced to four years in prison in July 2021, but was eventually acquitted on appeal due to lack of evidence.
