The court that is trying David Sánchez, brother of the President of the Government, will hear today from several key witnesses in relation to his alleged connection to the Badajoz Provincial Council in 2017. Those responsible for the two conservatories, the Superior and the Professional – Evaristo Valentí and Yolanda Sánchez Baltasar, respectively – will testify before the Court, whose coordination justified the creation of the senior management position that ended up being awarded to the musician. Neither of them conveyed to those responsible for Culture the need to incorporate the figure of a coordinator, since both considered that there were other priorities.
But, above all, they must clarify the email they exchanged on May 19, 2017, the same day that the rules to fill the position were published, with the subject “el hermanísimo”, (sent by Valentí to his partner) which seems to indicate that they assumed that the position already had a recipient, David Sánchez.
In his statement before the instructor, Judge Beatriz Biedma, Valentí was especially critical of the creation of the position of conservatory coordinator in the Provincial Council, which seemed “nonsense” to him, to the point that he threatened to resign.
Almost non-existent relationship
For her part, Sánchez Baltasar, director of the Professional Conservatory since 2010, stated that her relationship with David Sánchez once she joined the position was practically non-existent, to the point that the last email she exchanged with him dated back to August 2019, as she was dedicated to her “Young Opera” project.
Precisely what, according to the accusations, motivated the change in the nomenclature of his position, becoming head of the Performing Arts Office in 2022, whose tasks and location Sánchez himself was not able to explain.
The oral hearing resumes with the question of whether the court chaired by José Antonio Patrocinio leaves out one of the three crimes for which the musician is in the dock – that of accepting an illegal appointment – although the accusations consider that it is not statute-barred as it is a crime related to prevarication.
The Chamber has advanced the beginning of the session by half an hour to rule on the battery of previous questions from the defenses, which also includes the request that the videos of the controversial PSOE federal committee of October 2016 be incorporated into the procedure that precipitated the resignation of Pedro Sánchez from the leadership of the party (thus trying to limit his capacity for influence at that time to place his brother in the Badajoz Provincial Council).
Decision on the charges against Gallardo
Likewise, the musician’s lawyer asked the court to add to the summary the validations of the degrees that Sánchez obtained in the conversation in Saint Petersburg (Russia), which were approved in our country in a meteoric way, as the lawyer of one of the popular accusations, Alexis Aneas, from Liberum, recalled. With this documentation (which in any case already appears in the proceedings), he intends to prove that his academic training was sufficient to qualify for the position.
David Sánchez’s defense requested the annulment of the trial after denouncing that the root of the procedure is “rotten”, as he emphasized that the judicial action began with a “political” complaint from Manos Limpas.
But the Chamber must also rule in relation to the accusation against Miguel Ángel Gallardo, former president of the Badajoz Provincial Council, of the alleged connection in December 2023 of the former Moncloa advisor Luis Carrero (who also sits on the bench). His defense argued that he cannot be tried for these facts because when he gave his statement he was not questioned about it.
A claim in which he has the support of the Prosecutor’s Office, which considers that his right to defense was violated by not having had the opportunity to be questioned about these events (which began to be investigated after his court appearance, after David Sánchez himself alluded to Carrero in his statement).