A Colombian woman checks her passport in Florida, USA, in a file photo. Joe Raedle (Getty Images)
The specifications of the multi-million dollar public tender for the drafting of passports in Colombia convince almost no one. This follows Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva’s recent decision to suspend the ongoing tender following allegations by seven participating companies, showing conditions in the tender that would favor an old acquaintance: Thomas Greg & Sons (TGS), a Colombian consortium that Since 2007 hardly any competitor has managed to win such large orders as this year’s worth 599,651 million pesos (around 140 million dollars).
Despite its Anglo-Saxon name, the company has Colombian roots and a majority stake. It has been owned by the Bautista family for more than six decades and focuses on the business of transporting valuables, private security services and printing contracts for security-related documents such as cheques, stamps, voting cards, ID cards and passports. . The good health of the consortium has led to it being present in a dozen countries, from India to Brazil. However, brothers Camilo and Fernando at the helm of TGS have faced a number of allegations since the 1980s and spent a brief stint in prison in 1983 after being accused of an infamous fraud involving the export of fictional coffee to the United States . States and fraudulent loans totaling more than $120 million at the time (the brothers were released after admitting to petty crimes and cooperating with prosecutors).
This time, the warning comes from a dozen multinationals, including Germany’s Veridos state printers and France’s IN Groupe, which have five centuries of contractual histories with France’s highest levels of power. Conditions included in the list of demands included express priority for companies to have a manufacturing facility in Bogotá, a requirement unique to TGS; or the 44 days provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to prepare the presentation with the necessary samples, ink, 3 security chips and special papers (in other countries, according to a spokesman for the Colombian Ministry, the process usually takes between four and six months). Portuguese company Cadena, in the newspaper El Colombiano).
While waiting for the current contract between the State Department and TGS to expire on August 31, several questions arise about the government’s room for maneuver to balance the specifications. And it is that the relationship between Petro and the Bautista brothers, a former left-wing guerrilla and heirs to a family of entrepreneurs with a special bond with polo, couldn’t be closer. “Thomas Greg & Son portrays the presidents of Colombia,” Petro said defiantly during the 2019 regional election campaign. A year earlier, he had denounced fraud against him in the presidential election. However, he never presented any evidence and later dropped the matter.
For their part, the Bautistas have developed a close relationship with the Colombian establishment. The current mayor of Bogotá, Claudia López, as a senator of the independent party Green Alliance, denounced in 2016 that since Juan Manuel Santos took office in 2010, the Bautistas’ business had been boosted exponentially. The then-Congresswoman presented evidence that the contract model with the registry favored the family conglomerate in which the president and Nobel Peace Prize winner worked: she was a member of the board until she took over as defense secretary in 2006. According to López, the volume of contracts with TGS increased from 88 billion in other four-year periods to 690 billion with the Santos government through “hand-delivered, manipulated documents”.
Even when suspicions and accusations rained down from the left and the political center, the radical right did not fall by the wayside. Last May, in the closing stages of the presidential election campaign, Uribista and far-right Senator María Fernanda Cabal denounced on her Twitter account the existence of a web of ties between the opaque Costa Rican company that had audited the results of the presidential elections and Thomas Processing & Systems, a subsidiary of TGS. “The DISPROEL consortium (a temporary union led by the Bautista Palacios) has been generating multi-million dollar electoral deals in Colombia for more than fifteen years, as they appear to be the only ones who meet the exorbitant requirements demanded by the National Registry Office,” reads in the representation of the parliamentarian of the opposition Centro Democrático. In fact, TGS has been handling election logistics deals since 2010 — regardless of whether left-wing, center-right or center-right candidates emerged victorious.
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The current situation is difficult. There are fears on various fronts that there could be another bottleneck when it comes to passport applications. The slowdown in bidding could reignite the crisis the country endured during the pandemic, when obtaining a passport, a process that had become more agile and organized, teetered on the verge of failure. For their part, the Bautista family does not grant interviews to find out their position. On the Internet there is only one chat with Camilo, CFO of the multinational. In the YouTube video, the businessman tells his love story with polo and horse breeding, known as the sport of kings. When asked how he put together his polo team, called Las Monjitas, he replies: “I think you have to use a bit of luck. But things don’t happen by themselves.
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