The organization seeking thirteen years for Sánchez's wife once asked for money from a Putin oligarch

Six days before his retirement, returning from vacation, Madrid investigating judge Juan Carlos Peinado issued the last ruling of his career on Monday: he sent Begoña Gómez, the wife of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, along with her advisor at the Moncloa Palace, Cristina Álvarez, to trial before a jury. The charges are influence peddling and misappropriation of funds. The prosecution has said the same thing for two years: there is no crime. Only one party is demanding prison time, the group representing the popular prosecution, Hazte Oír: thirteen years for Gómez, six for her advisor. And this is where things really get interesting, because Hazte Oír is not simply an outraged Catholic civic association. The organization that wants to see the Spanish prime minister's wife behind bars asked for money in 2013 from Konstantin Malofeev, Putin's Orthodox oligarch, to fund its international expansion.

The case rests on two pillars. The first concerns a special chair at Madrid's Complutense University, of which Gómez became co-director despite having no university degree; according to the charge, the fact of whose wife she is played a role both in the creation of the chair and in her appointment. The same pillar includes the case of businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés: Gómez wrote him a letter of recommendation, and his company later won state contracts. According to the Madrid Provincial Court, there are indications that Gómez, acting as a private individual, engaged in influence peddling both in the creation of the chair and on behalf of Barrabés.

The second pillar concerns misappropriation of funds. According to the suspicion, Cristina Álvarez, who was paid from public funds by the prime minister's office, was in fact assisting Gómez's private professional activities, and the charge also concerns the fate of software developed for the chair. Álvarez is charged only with this, as an accessory.

What was left out is at least as telling. Over two and a half years, Peinado tried to pin five crimes on Gómez: influence peddling, business corruption, misappropriation of funds, unauthorized professional activity and misappropriation of property. He himself dropped the charge of unauthorized professional activity, while the provincial court threw out the business corruption and misappropriation charges. In total, the judge named seven suspects, including the government's delegate in Madrid, against whom the higher court found no grounds for suspicion whatsoever. He also sought to have Justice Minister Félix Bolaños investigated, but the Supreme Court found no "minimally substantiated indication." He also tried four times to pin the state bailout of the airline Air Europa on the wife, and was corrected four times.

How solid is the case? There is no simple answer, and that is precisely what makes it delicate. On one hand, the Madrid Provincial Court — which reined in Peinado countless times — itself confirmed in July that there are sufficient indications for a trial on two of the charges. On the other hand, the origin and course of the case are anything but spotless. The investigation began in April 2024 following a complaint from the far-right-linked group Manos Limpias, and was admittedly based on press reports. Sánchez withdrew from public life for five days at the time and publicly weighed resigning. Peinado later confiscated the passports of both Gómez and Álvarez — a decision quickly overturned by the higher court — and in one of his rulings he went so far as to suggest that the police officers protecting the prime minister's wife might even help her flee, for which a police union filed a complaint against him. In Monday's ruling, he again referred to "absolutist regimes" and Ferdinand VII, summoned witnesses over the weekend and on Holy Wednesday, personally went to the Moncloa Palace to question the prime minister, and a year later also questioned Minister Bolaños.

The prosecution's position has remained unchanged from the start: no crime occurred, and it is seeking acquittal. The defense is seeking the same. The date of the trial will be set by the Madrid Provincial Court, and such trials usually last four to eight months. The verdict will be decided by a jury of nine citizens chosen by lot, and the sentence will be pronounced by the presiding judge.

Who is demanding thirteen years?

The Spanish legal system recognizes the so-called popular prosecution: anyone — an individual, an association or a party — can join a criminal proceeding as a prosecutor, even without being a victim. This mechanism was designed as a tool of democratic oversight, but in practice it has become one of the cheapest weapons of political warfare. Several such prosecutors have appeared in the Gómez case, but only the popular prosecution led by Hazte Oír is seeking prison time.

Hazte Oír was founded in 2001 by lawyer Ignacio Arsuaga and became known for its anti-abortion and anti-gay-rights campaigns. In 2013, it created its international platform in Madrid, CitizenGO, which organizes petitions around the world in the name of the traditional family model. For years, Alexey Komov, the Russian representative of the American ultraconservative network World Congress of Families, sat on CitizenGO's board — and, more importantly, he was Konstantin Malofeev's right-hand man. Malofeev is no ordinary businessman: the "Orthodox oligarch" has been on sanctions lists since 2014 because Western governments say he financed separatists in eastern Ukraine. The editor-in-chief of his television channel, Tsargrad, was Alexander Dugin, sometimes referred to as "Putin's Rasputin." Komov worked at Malofeev's St. Basil the Great Foundation and directed political projects financed with the oligarch's money. In December 2024, American authorities indicted him for conspiracy and sanctions violations for assisting Malofeev.

The connection is not rumor but documented fact. In 2021, WikiLeaks published more than 17,000 internal documents from Hazte Oír and CitizenGO under the title "The Intolerance Network." Among them is a 2013 letter in which Arsuaga asked Malofeev for a hundred thousand euros in seed funding to launch CitizenGO, along with a subsequent financing agreement. The letter begins: "Thank you for the opportunity to personally present the idea of CitizenGO to you." CitizenGO has since denied ever receiving money from Russian oligarchs. Komov's name was quietly removed from its website in March 2022, after the Russian invasion. The organization also publicly supported Russia's so-called 2013 anti-gay-propaganda law.

None of this means that Begoña Gómez is innocent.

It will be up to the jury to decide whether the indications found by the provincial court amount to evidence. There is good reason to examine how the wife of a prime minister came to be co-director of a university chair without a degree, and why she wrote a letter of recommendation for a businessman whose company subsequently received state funds. If an employee of the prime minister's office was indeed working, paid from public funds, on the wife's private business, that constitutes misappropriation of funds, regardless of who the husband is.

But the picture becomes complete only when we also see who is leading the prosecution. This is a case in which the prosecution has seen no crime for two years, in which the demand for thirteen years in prison comes from an ultra-Catholic lobby that once sought funding for its international expansion from one of Putin's most important ideological financiers, and on whose board that oligarch's right-hand man sat for years. Meanwhile, Pedro Sánchez's government has become one of Europe's most outspoken critics of Israel's war in Gaza, and regularly clashes with Europe's far right. Madrid, then, need not dig too deep to find out who would benefit most from the Spanish prime minister being brought down by his wife's court case.

Russia's efforts to build influence in Europe rarely come in the form of tanks and drones. Much more often, they come through petitions, "family protection" conferences, well-funded civic organizations, and yes — through the status of popular prosecutor in a legal system that allows anyone to hold it. Whether Begoña Gómez is guilty will be decided by nine Spanish citizens. Who financed her prosecutor, we already know.

Ugar