The Bogota Comptroller’s Office has opened fiscal responsibility proceedings against the former and current directors of the city’s Urban Development Institute (IDU) for failure to comply with public infrastructure contracts.
The city’s new Comptroller Mario Solano Calderon announced Tuesday that former IDU director Liliana Pardo and current director Nestor Eugenio Ramirez will have to provide a response to the fact that only 16 out of 41 projects have been completed, even though they should have been started in 2009 and completed by March of this year.
The actual costs of a number of the projects have significantly increased from what was originally subscribed in the contract, when Bogota residents began paying for the projects with tax money in 2007.
“They did not achieve 50 percent of what they should have executed,” said the comptroller, in regards to the 25 infrastructure projects that either have yet to be initiated or have been suspended for various reasons, reported newspaper El Espectador.
Solano called attention to a particular road infrastructure project in which the body’s failure to comply with technical specifications could affect as many as 3 million of the city’s inhabitants.
“This project, if they don’t fix the technical problems, we will have to suspend it,” he said, according to newspaper El Tiempo.
Pardo is already under house arrest for her ties to the public works corruption scandal involving the Nule Group, while Ramirez subsequently replaced Pardo as the IDU director.