2023-08-05 05:01:00
Days after completing his first year in government, Colombian President Gustavo Petro is facing a major storm for the alleged illegal financing of his 2022 electoral campaign, confessed by his own son Nicolás, and whose legal and political consequences are unpredictable.
The temperature of the scandal has been rising since last Saturday when Nicolás Petro Burgos and his ex-wife, Daysuris Vásquez, were arrested in Barranquilla as part of an investigation for which the eldest son ended up charged with money laundering and illicit enrichment, and his ex for money laundering and violation of personal data.
alarms on
However, the revelation by the prosecutor in the case, Mario Burgos, that part of the money illegally obtained by the president’s son reached his campaign, set off alarm bells in the government. And although evidence of that complaint has not yet been made public, it led the head of state to give power to a lawyer to represent him. “It will be the judges in their different powers who legally define what corresponds. For this purpose, I have granted power to the associate judge of the Criminal Cassation Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, Mauricio Pava Lugo, to represent me,” announced the president. .
Given the political impact caused by what, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, Nicolás Petro recounted, the president’s lawyer said that they will immediately request “access to all the complaints so that they are unified and we can have a serious and respectful legal debate.”
Crime or conspiracy?
The president, who last night denied that his son had dirty his campaign with money received from drug trafficker Samuel Santander Lopesierra, alias “the Marlboro man”, and from a son of the controversial businessman Alfonso “Turco” Hilsaca, sees in the case a conspiracy “to trying to open the way for the collapse of the first popular government in Colombia”.
Regarding the complaints, the president admitted that he has received “with pain, on a personal level, information about alleged irregularities in the development of the presidential campaign on the coast,” where his son was building his electoral fiefdom as a deputy to the Assembly of the Department of the Atlantic.
The Interior Minister, Luis Fernando Velasco, reacted in a similar vein, disqualifying Nicolás Petro’s version because he had no administrative responsibility in the 2022 presidential campaign. crimes of illegal financing of campaigns”, said Velasco in an act in Cúcuta where he added that “there is no evidence, at least not yet, that indicates that one of these conducts could have occurred”.
possible implicated
In the event that these tests are presented, the first to respond would have to be the manager of that campaign, Ricardo Roa, current president of the state oil company Ecopetrol. “Ricardo Roa, president of Ecopetrol, must resign from his position because he was manager of Gustavo Petro’s campaign, accused by Nicolás Petro. And if he does not resign, that the Ecopetrol board of directors ask him to resign because Roa is doing him very serious harm to Ecopetrol,” asked former left-wing senator Jorge Robledo, candidate for mayor of Bogotá in the elections next October, on his Twitter account.
In the hypothetical case that Petro is splashed, the Investigation and Accusations Commission of the House of Representatives would be in charge of starting an impeachment process against him. The president of said Commission, the conservative Wadith Manzur, reported this Friday that since last March, when Daysuris Vásquez made the first complaints against Nicolás Petro, he has been carrying out “a process against the president of the republic” that “is in the of previous investigation”.
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