A new debate has broken out in Congress over sentencing laws in the proposed Anti-Corruption Statute.
The current debate centers on an article of the statute that, if passed, would reduce prison sentences for persons convicted of corruption who provide information about another person involved in the scandal.
The debate occurred just hours before a plenary session of Congress was scheduled to meet to reach agreement on over 115 of the project’s proposals, at 2 PM on Monday afternoon, Colombian media reported.
Representative Augusto Posada, of the president’s Partido de la U, said that the cases in which this occurs should be limited and very specific, because otherwise they could end up benefiting those who initiated the acts of corruption in the first place, including the directors of the Nule group.
“It can’t be that they pay a one or two year prison sentence for all of the harm that they have caused to Bogota,” said Posada of the Nule cousins, who were transferred to a prison in the capital over the weekend for their role in a corruption scandal that saw the fraudulent awarding of public works contracts.
Other articles of debate regard the establishment of lobby controls and the regulation of private sector campaign donations.
The proposed statute has undergone a number of debates in Congress since being introduced by President Juan Manuel Santos in September 2010.