Charges against Begoña Gómez for corruption and abuse of public office

The main charge against Gómez concerns her chair at Complutense, Madrid's most important university. According to the suspicions, private companies financed Gómez's professorship, and the university accepted this arrangement even though Gómez has not pursued any higher studies. According to the indictment, the university paid for advanced computer software for her courses, which Gómez then used for private purposes.

One of the large companies that supported Gómez's activities is Globalia, owner of the airline Air Europa. Just before the Spanish government granted a crisis package of 475 million euros to Air Europa in November 2020, Gómez met with several of the company's representatives.

The fact that Begoña Gómez will be tried by a jury and not by a regular court is due to the pressure exerted on those who have so far investigated Gómez's case, mainly the police officer Antonio Balas of the Civil Guard. An activist from the ruling Socialist Party, Leire Díez, will be prosecuted for his attempts to uncover private secrets about Balas, and about the judge in Extremadura who investigated suspicions of corruption against Pedro Sánchez's brother, David. Pedro Sánchez's closest man in recent years, the Socialist Party's former secretary Santos Cerdán, is awaiting prosecution for financing Leire Díez's campaign against the investigators.

When the suspicions against Gómez were first aired in the Spanish press in the spring of 2024, Pedro Sánchez threatened to leave politics. It was all a conspiracy by politically motivated media and courts, he said. Since then, several of Sánchez's closest associates, including former transport minister José Luis Abalos, have been sentenced to long prison terms for fraud during the pandemic, when pharmaceutical companies paid under the table to win government contracts for respirators.