Former prosecutor Néstor Humberto Martínez demands that Petro rectify his accusations for the ‘Odebrecht case’

Néstor Humberto Martínez, in a file image.

President Gustavo Petro has once again chosen former Attorney General Néstor Humberto Martínez as the target of his usual criticism of the corruption that is eating away at Colombia. With a series of trills that he published in recent days, he points out the alleged role of the ex-prosecutor in the payment of bribes made by Grupo Aval and the Brazilian Odebrecht to obtain a contract for Ruta del Sol II, in 2009. The former head of the The Prosecutor’s Office, minister of Juan Manuel Santos between 2014 and 2015, has picked up the gauntlet: he has requested this Tuesday that the president rectify his accusations. “I thought your systematic harassment behavior had been overcome, but that is not the case,” he told her in a letter.

The trigger for the new exchange of messages was the decision made last week by Grupo Aval, of the powerful Sarmiento Angulo family, to negotiate with the US authorities the payment of a fine that closes the investigations against it for the payment of bribes to take over Ruta del Sol II, a section of the dual carriageway that connects the center of the country with the Caribbean Coast. Aval, which was an Odebrecht partner in that work, promised to collaborate with the courts, to strengthen its anti-corruption procedures and to a fine of 60 million dollars (about 243,000 million Colombian pesos). In exchange, its directors will not face criminal charges and their companies will stop appearing in the reports as being investigated for this corruption case.

Petro has expressed his dissatisfaction with the agreement through X – the new name of Twitter. She sees it as a cover up for something that needs to be investigated and compensated in Colombia, something she believes was not done properly because of Martinez and others. The president recalled that the former prosecutor was the lawyer for Grupo Aval when a legal stability contract was signed to protect the Ruta del Sol concession from tax and regulatory changes, which, in his calculations, reduced the income tax payment of the 35% to a little over 1%. According to Petro, the ex-prosecutor received a success fee for that contract and then obstructed justice when the concession was investigated at the Attorney General’s Office. “This government wishes to shield the Attorney General’s Office from acts of judicial corruption in the future,” he declared.

During my Odebrecht debate when I was a senator, I denounced the Legal Stability contract signed to benefit Ruta del Sol, which was proposed by the Grupo Aval lawyer who later became Attorney General and where more than 3 million dollars were moved … pic.twitter.com/YMLLNeDwXy

— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) August 15, 2023

Martínez’s letter refutes several of the president’s allegations. He affirms that he was not the consortium’s lawyer at the time the concession was awarded and that, in reality, he assisted them for the legal stability contract. “(I did it) for a professional assignment that was made to me in 2010, six years before it was known that Odebrecht was a corrupt company,” he reads in the letter. In addition, he assures that the stability contract did not produce a reduction in the income tax payment and that the bribery involved was less than what Petro said. He denies having hindered the investigations during his term as attorney general (2016-2019) and comments that he denounced the irregularities before Petro himself. “It was in 2017, during my time as attorney general, that the existence of illegal payments to public servants to promote this contract was discovered,” he underlines.

“Regardless of the necessary rectification, I anticipate specifying that I will continue contributing to the public debate from my opinion column, which seems to bother you so much,” concludes the letter from the former attorney general, who has been a member of the center-right Cambio Radical party and is used to confront government officials. Peter, for his part, asked hours later to the Prosecutor’s Office to reopen the cases and investigate the recipients of the bribes. Likewise, he wants the Foreign Ministry to collaborate with the United States and Brazil to establish the damages that Grupo Aval and its partner have caused to the Colombian State. “Brazilians who committed crimes in Colombia enjoy total impunity and Odebrecht has not paid a peso of the fines imposed in Colombia,” he emphasizes.

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The accusations between the two leaders come in the midst of difficult days for the president. After the scandal caused by the announcement by his son Nicolás that he will provide evidence to the Prosecutor’s Office about the money that figures such as the ex-narco Samuel Santander Lopesierra and the son of the contractor Alfonso El Turco Hilsasca allegedly contributed to his father’s campaign, a report from Caracol Television revealed on Sunday that a drug trafficker and his wife organized celebrations in Yopal (Casanare) to support last year’s presidential candidacy. Although Nicolás clarified that his father did not know about these resources, and the drug lord’s wife has denied that they have given money to the campaign, Petro has shown on social networks the importance he attaches to questioning his honesty. “Every time I am slandered I will not keep quiet, I will ask for rectification and otherwise I will use the other procedures that Colombian law allows,” he wrote in one of his several messages.

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