2023-05-29 06:30:00
A new controversy broke out in the closest circle of the Casa de Nariño. This time, the noise of alleged corruption troubles reached the president’s chief of staff, Laura Sarabia, who in a single week went from being the most powerful woman in that government to starring in a scandal for alleged abuse.
In summary: Sarabia took her son’s ex-nanny, Marelbys Meza, to the basement of the Palace to submit her to polygraph tests and an interrogation in which she was threatened for the alleged theft of 150 million pesos, although in the complaint filed by Sarabia talks about $7,000.
The entire case leaves several questions in the air: what was the chief of staff doing with that amount of cash? Why did she mobilize official agents to solve a personal theft? And, most delicate of all, did she commit irregularities by subjecting one of her employees to a polygraph test at the Presidency facilities?
Despite these doubts, and more, both the Head of State and the other members of the Government have come out to defend Sarabia, arguing an alleged persecution of the media whom Petro does not dismiss as “liars.”
But it is not the first time that the people closest to Gustavo Petro have been involved in scandals of this type. The money that the chief of staff lost also recalls the $600 million in cash that the president’s son, Nicolás Petro, would have received from drug traffickers and questioned characters to support the presidential candidacy.
And not only that. The brother of the head of state, Juan Fernando Petro, is also being investigated for allegedly demanding million-dollar sums of money in the country’s prisons in exchange for not extraditing drug traffickers.
Despite the fact that they are all scandals that are still being prosecuted and Petro himself asked the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate them thoroughly, they have not stopped staining, one after another, the credibility of the president and his closest circle.
The contradictions of the robbery
In addition to the questions about subjecting his son’s former nanny to a polygraph, the robbery is also full of inconsistencies.
To begin with, it is not clear if there were 150 million pesos in the suitcase, as members of the Sijín said to intimidate Meza, or just under 7,000 dollars, as Sarabia has said to defend himself.
In any case, the chief of staff assured that these tickets were delivered to her by the Administrative Department of the Presidency as payment for travel expenses for official trips made during August 2022 and January 2023.
At this Sunday’s exchange rate, the money reported by Sarabia would represent a little more than 30 million pesos, so even if they came from an official entity, they could raise suspicions because of the way they arrived at Laura Sarabia’s house. . Which entity, which company pays such a sum in cash?
As Meza described to Semana magazine, the time he saw the briefcase that the family is now looking for was when one of the officers who works for the official came to the house with him asking where to leave it. “Leave it on that sofa I’m taking care of the baby.”
For all these questions, the official closest to the president was summoned to a political control debate in which she must explain the origins of those dollars and the possible abuses of power that she would have committed against her employee.
Regarding the latter, Meza reported that it was Sarabia’s husband who called her on a Saturday afternoon asking her to return to her place of work to ask about an urgent matter. Once he arrived, she found out that there was a missing suitcase with a large amount of money.
As she narrated, the official’s partner always treated her as the main suspect and, later, she was taken to a building in front of the Casa de Nariño in whose basements she was interrogated and subjected to a polygraph test to check if she said the truth.
“When I was in the basement, I felt kidnapped, dazed, drowning, waiting for them to take the polygraph,” Meza said.
Throughout this process, the Sijín agents and the presidential protection headquarters accused her of being a “thief and a liar” and even threatened to send her directly to jail and even to search her and all her relatives.
With all this, the prosecutor Francisco Barbosa – who has had harsh and repeated clashes with this government – criticized the alleged irregularities that were committed in that case and assured that “the Prosecutor’s Office is the only one that can advance these investigative processes.”
For now, what happened in a private environment of the chief of staff has become a matter of national interest in which the country is attentive to find out who was responsible for that robbery and, furthermore, if there was intimidation or abuse of power. with Sarabia’s ex-nanny.
The other scandals in the closest circle of petro
The alleged dirty money of Nicolás Petro, son of the head of state
According to the ex-wife of the president’s son, Day Vásquez, Nicolás would have received 600 million pesos from a former drug trafficker and a politician questioned for alleged ties to paramilitaries. Hours before the scandal was uncovered, the same president asked the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate whether crimes were committed. Despite the fact that the money was supposedly for the presidential campaign, Vásquez herself acknowledged that Petro never knew of those movements.
Juan Fernando Petro, brother of President Gustavo Petro
In addition to these alleged acts of corruption, the brother of the head of state is also being investigated for allegedly requesting large sums of money from drug traffickers’ lawyers in exchange for entering the total peace of Petro and receiving benefits such as prison transfers and until extradition. Regarding all this, both Juan Fernando and the president and his high commissioner for peace, Danilo Rueda, have pleaded not guilty.
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