Iberdrola sues El Confidencial for publishing news about the company "inexistent or contrary to the truth".

Iberdrola has filed a lawsuit for violation of the right to honor against Titania Compañía Editorial, S.L., the company that owns the digital newspaper EL CONFIDENCIAL. The writ was filed on January 21 for what the electricity company understands to be "more than two years of smear campaign and media harassment".

The lawsuit, which aims to denounce this informative treatment, is characterized, according to the company, by "over-information, biased treatment of the facts" and, what it considers more serious, the "publication of news that are directly non-existent or contrary to the truth".

The letter was accompanied by two expert reports from independent experts. The first one was prepared by Justo Villafañe, Professor of Corporate Reputation at the Complutense University of Madrid. The report gives examples of this smear campaign and evaluates the effect or impact it has had on Iberdrola's reputation.

In total, this campaign is made up of a total of 225 news items that the company has collected up to November 2021. This figure is equivalent to a frequency of 75 annual news items about Iberdrola in relation to the Cenyt case. "This is more news than all the other most relevant media combined, such as Expansión, El Periódico, Público, El Española, El País, La Vanguardia, ABC, El Mundo...", he specifies.

"This publication of news is done by applying a technique of over-information or saturation, as the periods of time between each piece of information are extremely short". Iberdrola understands that they all have the same focus and bias. It considers that they are "aggressive, biased and even outright false publications", as Villafañe's report explains.

This assertion has been confirmed recently when between Monday 17 and Thursday 20 January 2022, the digital published no less than five biased or false news items about the company.

The second report was prepared by the firm Álvarez & Marsal. The report quantifies in 17.6 million euros the amount of damages caused to Iberdrola for the unlawful interference of its fundamental right to honor. It should be noted that no claim is made for the damage generated by the total of the publications made by El Confidencial as part of its campaign, not even for the damage caused by the 68 news items identified by the corporate communications consultant Roman y Asociados, S.A. as particularly damaging.

The claim is made exclusively for the economic damage caused by 12 of these publications, considered in the context of the smear campaign as "flagrant examples of transgression of truthfulness". Likewise, the five most recent publications of last week's publication do not form part of the damage calculation either, despite "their falsehood and seriousness in their content".

Finally, it should be noted that what the lawsuit really seeks to do is, on the one hand, to highlight the violation of the right to honor and, on the other hand, to ensure that the defendant newspaper has the appropriate legal response. Thus, it is left to the discretion of the Judicial Authority to set the amount of the compensation, while making it clear that it will donate any amount to one or more non-profit institutions.