2023-08-19 09:21:04
Last week, the country learned the magnitude of the Odebrecht tsunami: 80,000 million pesos. That figure was reached by the prosecutors delegated to the Supreme Court who have spent months following the trail of the ticket fair that the company left in each contract and tender that it sought to win by any means. SEMANA knew every detail of the bribes: who delivered them, to whom they were given and by what means they came.
A fact that drew attention has to do with the two presidential campaigns of Juan Manuel Santos, in 2010 and 2014. The Prosecutor’s Office appraised, for the first time, the total amount of what he received: 3,540 million pesos. The breakdown is as follows. In 2010, $450,000 entered the campaign, which was valued at 844 million pesos at that time.
Juan Manuel Santos, former president. | Photo: Juan Carlos Sierra-Semana
It is regarding the transfer that the company made to the Impressa Group, a Panamanian company owned by Otto Félix Rodríguez and María Fernanda Valencia and that the country remembers as the payment of the famous posters that the condemned manager Roberto Prieto recognized. In 2014, the company contributed once more. He did it in two turns. The first was supposedly with the aim of financing internal surveys for a million dollars. They were delivered through the Paddington company, managed by Luis Alberto Peña Bernal. In turn, this subcontracted to the company Sancho.
The second transfer was for 850 million pesos and was made through a front company in Argentina owned by Víctor Eduardo López Cuéllar. That was the money brokered by Otto Bula. The former senator was sentenced to five and a half years in prison, following he agreed to collaborate with justice. In 2014, Odebrecht also financed Zuluaga’s campaign. The amount was 1.6 million dollars, 3,045 million pesos at that time. Unlike the Santos campaign, the money was transferred by the Department of Structured Operations of the Klienfield company to the publicist Duda Mendonça. For these facts, the Prosecutor’s Office recently charged former candidate Óscar Iván Zuluaga and his son David, who served as the manager.
Óscar Iván Zuluaga, former presidential candidate. | Photo: Juan Carlos Sierra-Semana
The presidential campaigns were the loudest and most visible face of Odebrecht’s corruption, but its objective was to obtain the juicy infrastructure contracts with the State. Prosecutor Francisco Barbosa delivered this week the balance of the case during his management: 60 additional charges, 16 indictments, 4 principles of opportunity and 11 sentences. “We have been able to advance like never before,” he said.
The senior official detailed the two new work fronts. The first, the call to charge 33 people among ANI officials, for the additions to Ruta del Sol II. And the second, the network of corruption with which Odebrecht executives created a criminal company to deliver 80,000 million pesos in bribes. In the latter, the country will investigate for the first time the Brazilian executives who delivered the money and who had not yet been touched by justice.
Otto Bula, former senator. | Photo: Guillermo Torres Reina-Semana
For this work, there is a matrix that shows the details of how that money was distributed. The investigators were able to specify each turn given in the different contracts that Odebrecht bet on at any cost.
On Ruta del Sol II, the bribery process was much more sophisticated and came from the contract signed on January 14, 2010, for 2 billion pesos, which was intended to fulfill the dream of connecting the center of the country with the Colombian Caribbean through a path.
Gabriel García Morales, former vice minister. | Photo: LEÓN DARIO PELÁEZ-week
“A parallel criminal company was consolidated that achieved that award… The criminal network had three phases: obtaining the mega-contracts, modifying the object of the contract and, for this, canceling gifts. These were paid through offshore companies, located outside the country and normally in tax havens”, explained prosecutor Gabriel Jaimes. Odebrecht used two companies to disburse the money: Klieneld Services Limited and Intercorp Logiscs Ltda.
The turn of the silver occurred in different stages. The first was in the adjudication. There, Odebrecht gave 6.5 million dollars to Gabriel García Morales. The payment was made through the company of Eduardo and Enrique Ghisays, Lurion Trading INC.
Another two million dollars were distributed to achieve the legal stability of the contract. The recipients were Otto Nicolás Bula, Bernardo Miguel Elias, Antonio Guerra de la Espriella and Miguel Picco Pastrana.
Federico Gaviria, contractor. | Photo: Guillermo Torres Reina-Semana
The large silver, however, was delivered in the others. The Prosecutor’s Office calculates that the bribes for that phase (in the addition of the contract and the others 1, 2, 4, 7, 9 and 10) reached 117,782,567,475 pesos.
In this phase, the main protagonists are two: Otto Bula and Federico Gaviria. There are punctual twists in the hands of the investigators. For Gaviria, 8,512,863,840 appear in December 2013 and then 512,195 dollars in 2014.
This same year, in December, there is another transfer of 2,540,801,590 pesos to Gaviria and Bula. In June 2015, Bula received another $2,727,000. And then, once more with Gaviria, they received an additional 2,987,815,908 pesos. The intermediaries for these funds were the Panamanian companies Coast Helicopters Inc, Heliconte SA, Consultores Unidos, Consorcio Sion, Técnicas Territoriales Urbanas TTU and Compañía Profesionales de Bolsa SA
El Ñoño Elías also appears several times in turns of 2014. He shares one with Federico Gaviria for 10,062,997,560 pesos. And then he has only one of 7,604,759,999 pesos in December of this year. In 2016, he appears once more with 2,909,307,039, which he shares with Federico Gaviria. And then Gaviria appears with Ñoño Elías in a payment of 3,620,611,900.
Bernardo Elías, former senator. | Photo: Guillermo Torres Reina-Semana
The Prosecutor’s Office has also established that throughout this corrupt process some officials of the National Infrastructure Agency who were in charge of planning, approving and materializing Odebrecht’s wishes would have received more than 1,028 million pesos in bribes. Then, another 53,000 million pesos in what had to do with the Ocaña-Gamarra stretch. Two people linked to the company Inversores Profesionales appear in this section: Marina de Nubila and Luis Bernardo Villegas.
The last chapter has to do with Navelena. The company paid kickbacks to run influence peddling for the financial close. On July 1, 2016, he turned 464,000,000 and then and on September 2 of this year, 464,000,000. The recipient of the money was once more Otto Bula.
With all this information, justice seems to be advancing now in one of the most shameful cases in the country’s history, which allowed the two candidates for the presidency and the great infrastructure works to be trapped in the corrupt interests of a company that had no boundaries.
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