Before the Attorney General’s Office, Luis Fernando Duque, then legal representative of Populated Centersflatly denied having signed the documents with which the fraud was committed to achieve the billionaire contract with the Ministry of Technology to bring the Internet to several schools in the country.
“Although they impute falsehood to me, I do not think they have found any evidence that the lines in those signatures coincide with the lines that I can make (…) I was not in the participation of the firm that was involved there and that turned out to be branded falseit’s hard to get proof of something I didn’t do,” he said.
For its part, the lawyer Jorge Pino Ricci, who today is a lawyer for the Temporary Union, said that he businessman Emilio Tapia He was the one who looked for the insurance businessman Juan José Laverde to obtain the bank guarantees for the award of the contract.
“Tapia said that he contacted Juan José Laverde to do the management, to obtain the guarantees for the presentation of the offer, but also for the legalization of the contract as an execution requirement,” said the lawyer.
Pino Ricci said that after the scandal was uncovered, it became known that Tapia “was a hidden partner” who was part “of a group of businessmen who collaborated to structure the presentation of the offer (…) and that he admitted to the authorities that he was the owner of several of the companies that were part of the temporary union and that he had the opportunity to explain how the procedure for the sole guarantee of compliance had been.
The lawyer also recalled Laverde’s statement. “Juan José Laverde informs in his statement (…) that it was going to be an action before a man named Jorge Molina and that he communicated this option to obtain the guarantee through Jorge Molina”.
Laverde reached a pre-agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office, in which he accepted the crimes of falsehood in a private document and procedural fraud and could pay four years in prison for the case.
According to the accusation against him, he would have participated in the falsification of a bank guarantee that led the Ministry to award the contract and disburse the 70,000 million pesos that were apparently used for the purpose of the contract.
For this case, the Attorney General is investigating several officials of the Ministry, after a complaint filed by the then Minister Karen Abudinen.
