The condemned key of Aval for the ‘Odebrecht case’ fuels new doubts about the conglomerate

Far from closing the scandal over the payment of millionaire bribes from Odebrecht in Colombia in exchange for juicy public works contracts, the recently signed agreement between Grupo Aval and the United States authorities raised questions and a new barrage of criticism of the property conglomerate. by Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo.

José Elías Melo, the former president of Corficolombiana – the group company that partnered with Odebrecht to obtain the concession for the highway known as Ruta del Sol II after delivering bribes – rejected Aval’s agreement with the United States Department of Justice United States and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in which the conglomerate agrees to have violated the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of that country and agrees to pay a penalty of 80 millions of dollars. Melo, convicted in the case in Colombia of having participated in the payment of bribes, argues that the pact contains conclusions “contrary to the truth”, if they are based on his actions.

Although Melo’s name does not appear in the agreement, it mentions a “Corficolombiana executive” who served from 2008 to approximately 2016, a period that coincides with the period in which the prestigious lawyer directed the investment company.

Before coming to the financial world and the Sarmiento family company, Melo was secretary of the Monetary Board of Banco de la República, Vice Ministry of Finance and Public Credit, Banking Superintendent and Minister of Labor in the 1990s. In 2019, he was sentenced to 11 years and nine months in prison for bribery and improper performance of contracts. The Colombian justice found that the director of Aval learned of the meetings in which officials of the Brazilian multinational agreed to bribes for 6.5 million dollars with the former Vice Minister of Transportation Gabriel García Morales for the award of the section of the dual carriageway that connects the center of the country with the Caribbean Coast.

The deferred accusation agreement, as the agreement between Grupo Aval and the US authorities is called, provides a detailed description of the events for which Sarmiento Angulo’s companies have returned to the center of public debate, and that they have no to do with the 2009 bribes, but with subsequent events, known in Colombia since the scandal broke out seven years ago.

The document indicates that between 2012 and 2015, the companies that were part of the Ruta del Sol II concessionaire, through an executive from Corficolombiana, two executives from Odebrecht and two intermediaries, “knowingly and deliberately conspired and agreed with others to corruptly offering and paying more than $23 million in bribes to, and for the benefit of, Colombian government officials.” The objective was “to obtain undue advantages in order to obtain and retain business”, specifically, to add another road to the dual carriageway that crosses it, known as the Ocaña-Gamarra transversal.

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Melo denies having known or approved any bribery agreement for the approval of the addition. “I did not participate in any way in the bribes paid to officials of the Government of Colombia for the Ruta del Sol II project for US$28 million between 2014 and 2016 referred to in point 15 of the SEC document,” he said in a statement. announcement public.

The convicted person adds that in the criminal proceedings in Colombia “the knowledge, responsibility and autonomy of management that people linked to Grupo Aval and Corficolombiana, other than José Elías Melo Acosta, had directly and independently regarding financial, operational and accountants from both the Ruta del Sol II Concessionaire and the Consol construction consortium, in which José Elías Melo Acosta obviously never intervened”. In short, Melo says that he had nothing to do with the bribes for the addition, and that those responsible and those who know what happened are other “people linked to Grupo Aval and Corficolombiana.”

The answer creates a new blanket of doubt. For the analyst Juan Carlos Flórez, it opens the question about who close to the Sarmiento Angulo family, or members of the family group, have the information that Melo denies knowing. “What this would be revealing is that in the agreement with the United States justice the scapegoat is Melo because there he is pointed out as the key official of the Sarmiento Angulo, but he is saying that there was a parallel decision-making system , both to decide how the work was going to be delivered to them and to give bribes,” says Flórez.

In addition, the agreement mentions three Colombian officials, without including names. The first, says the text, had a high position in the legislative branch. It would be the former senator Bernardo “El Ñoño Elías”, who spent eight years in jail. The second was an executive from the National Infrastructure Agency: “The clues point to Juan Sebastián Correa, who acted as ANI’s liaison with Congress and who was Otto Bula’s key file to pay bribes. Correa was disqualified for 18 years by the Attorney General’s Office for receiving a bribe of 100 million pesos,” said journalist Daniel Coronell. The enigma falls on the third, a high-ranking official in the executive branch between “in or around 2010 and in or around 2018”, during the term of former President Juan Manuel Santos. That third official would have received payments for 3.4 million dollars and rumors, discussions and cabals have been woven about his identity.

Francisco Bernate, president of the Criminal Lawyers College, believes that, although the Colombian justice has acted in the scandal with fines and sentences, it does not mean that the case is closed. “The agreement has the implications of being an acknowledgment in which it is realized that officials in Colombia were bribed. The Prosecutor’s Office has forms of international cooperation or can carry out its own investigations in order to determine who those bribed public officials were, so that they can be prosecuted. The US Department of Justice acknowledged that the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce and the Colombian Attorney General’s Office provided substantial assistance in the investigations.

The agreement, and the reaction of those who have investigated the entire bribery scheme, such as President Gustavo Petro, has once again recalled the recordings of 2015 in which it was evident that the former prosecutor Néstor Humberto Martínez knew of complaints of irregular payments since before before the scandal broke out and was appointed prosecutor in 2016. Martínez was one of the most important external lawyers for Grupo Aval at the time when the consortium led by Odebrecht took over the road mega-project.

The recordings came to light at the end of 2018, days after the strange death of Jorge Enrique Pizano, who was the interlocutor of Martínez in the audios and monitored the correct management of the resources as comptroller of the project. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the death occurred due to natural causes. Just three days later, his 30-year-old son, Alejandro, died after drinking water from a bottle found on his father’s desk. In the investigations that are being carried out in Colombia, a line of investigation is still open on alleged threats to witnesses to favor the ex-prosecutor Martínez and Sarmiento Angulo.

Another front that is still open is that of irregular financing of political campaigns. After the imputation of charges against the former Uribe candidate Oscar Iván Zuluaga and his son David Zuluaga for receiving contributions from the Brazilian firm, the Democratic Center has demanded that the campaign of Juan Manuel Santos be investigated, also dotted with complaints about the alleged financing of odebrecht.

In the midst of the commotion over the agreement, President Gustavo Petro, caught in the middle of questions over the alleged inflow of drug money into his campaign, has also sought to return the focus to his predecessors, which has led to a head-on clash with Martinez.

In the meantime, Aval will have to continue to cooperate with the United States authorities until the investigations and processes related to the addition bribes are concluded or until the end of a three-year period. “It is understood that the company must at all times provide complete, truthful and accurate information,” the document indicates. Only if you comply with all your obligations, will the criminal process cease definitively.

Criminal lawyer Fabio Humar explains that “the gringos are 100 times more pragmatic than the Colombian justice, and they tell a company: ‘you committed some irregularities, take advantage of an early termination system with the payment of fines and some medium-term commitments . I call off the chase. Or let’s go to the end, but know that I have everything to win’”. In 99% of cases, companies take advantage of this early termination similar to a principle of opportunity in Colombia, concludes the lawyer.

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