On Wednesday, a prosecutor’s office in Madrid, Spain, he said of having launched an investigation against the wife of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Begoña Gómez, accused of trafficking in illicit influence. The investigation was opened after a complaint from Manos Limpias (Clean Hands), a union known for its far-right positions and for other complaints against left-wing and centre-left political leaders, which are very often unfounded.
The investigation began on April 16, but the prosecutor’s office only made it known on Wednesday, after the publication of some documents indiscretions by the newspaper The confidential. As reported by the newspaper, the investigation concerns the relationships between Gómez and some private companies that received funds and public contracts from the government led by her husband.
According to the accusation, Gómez would have exploited in particular his relationship with the Spanish Prime Minister to favor a private company in obtaining a large public loan (hence the accusation of trafficking in illicit influence). At the center of the investigation were some private meetings that took place in 2020 between Gómez, who was then head of the IE Africa Center foundation, and Javier Hidalgo, the CEO of Globalia, a Spanish tourism group that owns the Spanish airline Air Europa. In the same year, and after the meetings between Gómez and Hidalgo, Air Europa had received government funding of 475 million euros, the largest granted to a private company in that period: the money came from the SEPI fund, created by the Spanish government to support companies in difficulty due to the pandemic.