The Prosecutor’s Office requested an insurance measure for those involved in the Buen Comienzo case in Medellín
At the beginning of the hearing for the Buen Comienzo case of the Medellín Mayor’s Office, held on February 13, 2023, the Prosecutor’s Office requested an insurance measure for Alexandra Agudelo, Secretary of Education of Medellín, Lina María Gil, former technical director of Buen Comienzo, and Henry Paulison Gómez, legal representative of the Colombia Avanza Corporation after finding them guilty for the irregularities presented in the contracting for early childhood care.
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Buen Comienzo is the Medellín Mayor’s Office program that provides initial education and promotes the integral, diverse, inclusive and autonomous development of boys, girls and their families during their first five years of life, through different care modalities that respond to your needs.
Two of the four crimes would have been charged by contract 4600085185, which would be: the signing of a contract without compliance with legal requirements and embezzlement for attempted appropriation, precisely due to irregularities in agreements whose purpose was to care for the Buen Comienzo family modality .
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One of the irregularities that the Prosecutor’s Office found is about the conditions in which some contracts were signed and indicates that they should not be for the provision of services, but for abbreviated selection or association agreement that had several offers.
Irregularities were also found in the settlement of the contract and the Prosecutor’s Office continues to investigate possible cost overruns in food packages to check if there were any alterations in payments.
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The second contract is 4600085448 and had as its objective the delivery of food to the student population, which is also the subject of investigation and for which two charges have been found: undue interest in the contract and embezzlement by appropriation.
In this contract, it is investigated whether the officials would have used the manifest urgency of the pandemic to suspend the original tender and award the contract directly with Colombia Avanza. The second fact would also have arisen due to cost overruns but with an additional aggravating circumstance due to duplicate payments when contracting the same function.
In summary, Alexandra Agudelo would have altered the contract with Colombia Avanza to benefit third parties, in this case, with the complicity of Gil and Gómez.
Agudelo had the power to approve the suitability analysis of the corporation, the signing of the contract, and he is also the one who orders its spending, however, all these powers were used to award the contracts arbitrarily, which is why they entered into investigation by control agencies.
In the investigations carried out by the Prosecutor’s Office, it would have been confirmed that one of the Colombia Avanza warehouses would have been used for the execution of the activities, even though the list of requirements requested that the company to which the contract was awarded must have own storage space.
This is not the only fact for which it has been investigated, it was also known that in 2020 it would have allowed the secretariat to act as the political platform of the former councilor of the Albert Corredor Democratic Center and it could be confirmed that to date it continues to be useful for interests electoral.
Agudelo has been related to the University Corporation of America (CUA), which belongs to the family of former Councilor Corredor.
The Prosecutor’s Office requested the suspension of the official, who would have been chosen by the current candidate for mayor, Corredor, in order that she, precisely, act as a resource office for the campaign for the Medellín Mayor’s Office.
The prosecutor stated that the corporation was given a contract that, due to technical and financial conditions, is not consistent, since it exceeds its capacity by 2,800%. The judicial body requested a prison house for the officials.