“We have to defend the truth, because we will defend the truth. And the truth is that my brother and my wife are innocent.” This was the verdict Pedro Sánchez gave in September last year when asked about the judicial investigations into Begoña Gómez and David Sánchez. However, the Audiencia de Badajoz has sentenced the brother of the Prime Minister to nine years of disqualification from public employment as the author of necessary cooperation in a crime of administrative prevarication.
From La Moncloa they try to maintain composure, despite the obvious anger over the guilty verdict. “We respect the sentence but do not agree with it,” stated Elma Saiz, spokesperson for the Executive. The Government prefers to focus on the fact that the Prosecutor’s Office saw no signs of a crime and requested acquittal, and they express confidence that “higher courts will confirm the innocence of David Sánchez, which is what we believe.”
This sentence deepens within the Government the feeling that there is a “campaign” and a “persecution” against them, involving political parties, pseudo-unions, media, and some judges, with the aim, they say, of bringing down the Executive. A thesis that has always been defended and is once again voiced by Óscar Puente, Minister of Transport: “This era will be studied in history books as the one in which the seams of our most essential institutions were stretched with the sole purpose of overthrowing a government due to the inability to do so at the polls.”
A hard line maintained by the socialist spokesperson in Congress, Patxi López, who called the sentence an “authentic barbarity” in the corridors of the Lower House, and denounced the existence of a “hunt” against the head of the Executive. For López, “the only thing this sentence determines is the triumph of the far-right strategy” because in his view “a crime has not been prosecuted” but a person “for being the brother of the Prime Minister.”
This theory that this investigation is part of an operation to bring down the Executive is supported from Ferraz: “This case is part of a strategy to wear down a progressive Government by any means. When innocent people are persecuted for being relatives of the Prime Minister and noise prevails over facts, democracy loses. We all lose.”
The sentence, in addition to David Sánchez, condemns the former president of the Diputación de Badajoz and former leader of the PSOE and candidate in this community Miguel Ángel Gallardo to 18 years of disqualification from public employment as the author of two crimes of administrative prevarication. A sentence with which the socialist party “respects but disagrees. David Sánchez, Miguel Ángel Gallardo, and the technicians are innocent and have the full support of the PSOE,” said Rebeca Torró, secretary of Organization of this formation.