BOGOTA_ He chancellor Colombian Álvaro Leyva was called to disciplinary proceedings and suspended for three months, the Attorney General’s Office reported on Wednesday after finding possible irregularities during a million-dollar and controversial bidding process to produce passports.
The suspension is effective immediately and could be extended for another three months, according to Colombian law governing disciplinary investigations.
Leyva did not immediately comment on the Attorney General’s decision. According to the Foreign Ministry, she is carrying out an agenda in Geneva at the World Forum on Migration and Development.
Disciplinary research
The Attorney General’s Office – in charge of disciplinary investigations of public officials – detailed in a statement that Leyva had incurred two disciplinary offenses provisionally classified as “very serious as a result of fraud.”
The investigation focuses on the bidding process to choose the company in charge of designing and printing passports in Colombia with a budget of close to 150 million dollars.
The alleged disciplinary offenses would have been committed by declaring the 2023 tender void without the necessary “factual, legal and technical” foundations and by then declaring an urgency in the processing of the contract without, apparently, sufficient grounds existing.
The Attorney General’s Office decided to provisionally suspend the chancellor to prevent him from repeating the disciplinary failures and given that he is still in charge of the new process for preparing passports.
The tender to produce passports has been surrounded by controversy. In May 2023, the tender was opened in which an operator called Thomas Greg & Sons was the only one that met the requirements and had already prepared the passports in the past.
The Foreign Ministry received criticism from some sectors and the press who pointed out possible favoritism for that operator to keep the contract. The Attorney General’s Office then warned that it was closely monitoring that guarantees of “objective selection” were given.
After criticism, in September of that year the Foreign Ministry declared the tender void, which forced a new process to begin.
“Desert the process”
Leyva explained to Congress last December that he decided to declare the process void due to observations presented by other bidders who considered that the principles of equal opportunities were not being guaranteed.
The decision was refuted and the company announced that it would sue the State for 117,000 million pesos (about 29 million dollars).
Given the uncertainty over the issuance of passports, the Foreign Ministry resorted in October to the figure of “manifest urgency”, a legal exception that allows direct hiring without holding a tender. According to the entity, the “only firm that demonstrated” having the capacity to execute the contract immediately was Thomas Greg & Sons, which finally obtained it.
The Foreign Ministry has said that it plans to open a new tender for the production of passports.
Source: AP
