BOGOTA.- Two of the magistrates investigating in the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Colombia the alleged illegal financing of the presidential campaign of the current Colombian President Gustavo Petro They filed a presentation with the organization to debate whether to file charges against the head of state.
Magistrates Álvaro Prada and Benjamín Ortiz presented an extensive document that includes several months of investigation after which they concluded that there are sufficient arguments to determine that the ruling coalition Historical Pact violated campaign salary caps permitted by law, among other irregularities.
The CNE magistrates will discuss the presentation in the coming days, reported the Colombian media Semana.com.
Among the cases that appear in the document, disclosed by Semana.com, is the alleged omission of a donation to the campaign made by the Colombian Federation of Educators (Fecode) which, according to the magistrates, cannot be considered a source of financing because it is a legal entity.
“Finally, it is possible to conclude, as indicated in section 4.4 of this provision, in the terms of the provisions of article 14 of Law 996 of 2005 and the provisions of the Constitutional Court in Sentence C-1153 of 2005 , that it is not admissible for legal entities to make contributions to presidential campaigns, since such conduct distorts the balance in the democratic regime, which is why the contribution made by the Colombian Federation of Education Workers (Fecode) was not permitted. being banned as a source of financing.”
Another of the reported cases is the payment to more than 60,000 people who served as electoral witnesses of the Historical Pact, which were not reported in the report of income and expenses of the campaign before the CNE.
“From the above, it is possible to conclude that (i) payments were materially made to electoral witnesses for the campaign; (ii) that such economic facts were not reported within the income and expense report of the campaign, (iii) that there is no trace of the origin of the resources transferred by the company Ingenial Media SAS to Matrix Giros y Servicios SAS – Su Red ; (iv) that the company Ingenial Media SAS could not legally donate the resources it invested to pay for electoral witnesses because it was a legal entity, and (v) that the anonymous complainant was actually right when he stated, among other things, that: “(…) Mr. Jonathan Ramírez Nieves and Mr. Ricardo Roa broke the law by not reporting the donations that were received (…).”
Likewise, the document refers to the payment for the air transportation service of the Sadi company. The CNE found inconsistencies in the information on the planes in which Petro and his close circle were transported to several cities in the country throughout 2022.
“The above allows us to infer an alleged alteration of the accounting information in relation to air transport services, taking into account that a total of 120 ‘guaranteed’ flight hours were agreed upon, so there is no justification for the decrease or omission. of reports on the provision of the services caused,” the presentation states.
The document of the magistrates includes that it was not allowed for the campaign of the current president of Colombia to receive funds from the Workers’ Union of the Petroleum Industry (USO), since “it is not admissible for legal entities to make contributions to presidential campaigns to the distort the balance in the democratic regime; therefore, the contribution made by the Union Sindical Obrera of the Petroleum Industry (USO) was not permissible since such source of financing was prohibited.”
Source: With information from Semana.com
