Through a periodic meeting led by the Deputy Attorney General, cases of bad practices in public procurement will be known so that, they will be investigated and penalized.
Within the framework of the board of directors of infrastructure Junta Directiva Nacional de la Cámara Colombiana de la Infraestructura (CCI), the Attorney General, Francisco Barbosa Delgado, encouraged this union to work in a coordinated manner and combat those bad practices in public procurement from a criminal pespective.
“It is essential to have a permanent dialogue with the Attorney General’s Office (…) because many times the cases are known by the Inspector´s General Office Procuraduria and not by us and that is important in order to be able to alert when these activities occur and to make exemplary decisions in some of these conducts that are considered criminal acts that can be monitored by the Office of the Attorney General”, stated the Attorney General Francisco Barbosa.
He stressed that this dialogue will be held periodically and will allow combating the situations reported by the union, such as the alteration in the standard documents, the subjective evaluation criteria and the uses of the inter-administrative agreements.
Likewise, the Attorney General stressed that another practice such as the improper use of temporary unions in Colombia is being closely examined. “Experience is being provided to companies and collections of those experiences are being conducted. This practice has been determined and detected by the judicial investigations,” he said.
He encouraged the CCI to inform the Office of the Attorney General about these behaviors, through specific cases, so that the institution can begin to investigate as a matter of priority, the facts that are affecting public procurement and achieve exemplary penalties.
Corruption cases in Colombia cannot affect public procurement. Here in Colombia, when there is an scandal we want to destroy the institutions. “There are thousands of contractors who have acted correctly, there are thousands of public servants and businessmen who have done things well (…) corrupt practices must be prosecuted”, stressed the Attorney General Barbosa
He pointed out that specific cases in which companies are not going through the screening process of the principles of public procurement but are going through the private sector using some mechanisms such as inter-administrative agreements will also be investigated.
“Inter-administrative agreements are processes used by entities to avoid contracting and benefit sole bidders. At this pre-electoral moment, we are seeing recruitment movements to favor political campaigns”, he assured.
Finally, he highlighted the joint work that has been carried out by the Office of the Attorney General during this year to tackle different criminal behaviors, allowing not only judicial consequences, but also to impact criminal finances.
“Corruption cases must go through assets forfeiture process, and this will be very important to prosecute these organizations,” he said.