The Foreign Minister of Colombia, Álvaro Leyva Durán, has been provisionally suspended for three months from his position by order of the Attorney General's Office. The entity formulated a statement of objections to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Gustavo Petro's Government for exceeding his duties in the fulfillment of his duties by not delivering a tender that had already been awarded to a company. This is about the convoluted controversy that has surrounded the million-dollar contract for the production of passports.
According to the decision of the Attorney General's Office, Leyva “would have incurred two disciplinary offenses, provisionally classified as very serious committed by way of fraud.” The first, by declaring the tender void without having the factual, legal and technical foundations, which could violate the principles of transparency, economy and responsibility of state contracting. The public tender in which the only bidder was the firm Thomas Greg & Sons was declared void last September, a process for which the company already filed a lawsuit for 117,000 million pesos. Secondly, the Attorney General's Office explained, it decided to bring charges against the chancellor “for supposedly decreeing manifest urgency during the development of the contractual procedure without, apparently, there being grounds to adopt that determination.”
For months, the passport tender had kept the Foreign Minister on the ropes. He even earned him a bitter discussion with the then director of the National Legal Defense Agency of the State, Martha Lucía Zamora. The two officials ended up harshly confronted in the hallways of the Casa de Nariño itself, and the president chose to separate Zamora, who left hurling accusations against Leyva.
At 81 years old, the chancellor is the most senior figure in the cabinet and has overcome the ministerial shakeups without major shocks throughout the year and a half of Government, despite his multiple controversies.
(News in development, awaiting expansion)
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