Afp
The newspaper La Jornada
Saturday, July 27, 2024, p. 22
Bogotá. The head of Colombia’s National Intelligence Directorate, Carlos Ramón González, resigned yesterday after being accused by prosecutors of leading a scheme to bribe parliamentarians, President Gustavo Petro announced.
This is the closest suspect to the president to fall due to the corruption scandal, which implicates the government in the National Risk Management Unit (UNGRD).
I accept the resignation of Carlos Ramón (…). His role as head of civil intelligence is incompatible with any judicial investigation.wrote the president on the social network X.
Gonzalez was accused by the prosecution of giving instructions to bribe the presidents of the two chambers of parliament in exchange for speeding up the processing of various government legislative initiatives.
The alleged bribes would have amounted to one million dollars and were delivered at the end of 2023, when González was director of the Administrative Department of the Presidency of the Republic (Dapre), according to the prosecuting body.
President Petro requested that a thorough investigation against corruption be carried out in all cases, no matter who is guilty.
González, who was a member of the defunct M-19 guerrilla group alongside the president, maintains his innocence, but in his resignation letter he admitted that his position is politically unsustainable.
The Attorney General’s Office opened an investigation into the Minister of Finance, Ricardo Bonilla, and Luis Fernando Velasco, former head of the Interior Ministry, for their alleged participation in the corruption plot, and linked the Colombian ambassador to Argentina, Camilo Romero, and eight congressmen to the case.
The Executive has been shaken by this corruption scandal, in which two senior executives of the state emergency body have confessed to having used public resources to bribe legislators.
Olmedo López and Sneyder Pinilla, former director and former deputy director of UNGRD, respectively, confessed to the prosecution that they diverted money intended for climate emergencies in some of the poorest regions of Colombia.