Archive image of Óscar Iván Zuluaga during a press conference in Bogotá. Sebastian Barros (NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Prosecutors said on Tuesday that they would request a hearing to indict former finance minister and former Democratic Center presidential candidate Óscar Iván Zuluaga for allegedly stealing, without reporting, $1,610,000 from the Brazilian Construction company Odebrecht received for him campaign. With this money they wanted to finance the hiring of the Brazilian publicist Duda Mendonça.
The crimes against which Zuluaga is charged are forgery of private documents, procedural fraud and illicit enrichment. His son David Zuluaga, who acted as manager of this presidential campaign, is charged with procedural fraud.
According to prosecutors, in 2014, when Zuluaga met Juan Manuel Santos in the presidential campaign, the Uribista candidate met at his home in Bogotá with Eleuterio Antonio Martorelli, then Odebrecht director in Colombia. At these meetings, it was reportedly agreed that the Brazilian multinational would pay insidiously for some of the services provided to the campaign by publicist José Eduardo Cavalcanti de Mendonça, Duda Mendonça.
In this way, Odebrecht, who has also been involved in similar cases in other Latin American countries, allegedly deposited $1,610,000 in an election campaign payment into an account held by Mendonça in Panama. According to prosecutors, Zuluaga was “aware of the illegal donation,” and in the campaign statement he submitted to the National Electoral Council (CNE, the organization that controls elections in the country), he omitted the payment. In doing so, he managed to obtain a 25,000 million pesos compensation for the votes received and misled the CNE, which closed an ongoing investigation into the same case.
Prosecutors also accuse former minister Cecilia Álvarez-Correa
Prosecutors also announced the indictment of Juan Manuel Santos Minister of Transport, Cecilia Álvarez-Correa, for allegedly obtaining personal benefits and favoring the consortium of contractors (which included Odebrecht) on the highway between the municipalities of Ocaña and Norte de Santander) and Gamarra (Cesar), on the Ruta del Sol II.
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Allegedly, Álvarez-Correa, who was in charge of the portfolio between 2012 and 2014, advocated the inclusion of two addendums (addendums to an already signed contract) that added the section between Ocaña and Gamarra to the original highway project. With these adjustments, Álvarez-Correa allegedly favored the consortium that built this section of the so-called Ruta del Sol, the road that connects the center of the country to the Caribbean coast, since it received additional works directly without participating in any tender. It could also have benefited a river transport project on the Magdalena River aimed at opening a terminal in Gamarra. For this reason, the criminal offense of disproportionate interest in the execution of the contract is raised.
In the same case, an investigation was launched into former Minister of Education Gina Parody – Álvarez-Correa’s partner – who had been charged with allegedly attending the session of the National Council for Economic and Social Planning (CONPES) that gave the green light to the Ruta del Sol- plan and allowed the addition of the section between Ocaña and Gamarra. According to prosecutors, there is no evidence of unlawful conduct by Parody.
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