The director of Colombia’s State Legal Defense Agency (ANDJE), Cesar Palomino, owned a company whose ship was caught transporting marihuana between Pacific ports twice, according to news website La Silla Vacia.
During a third raid, marines found that the ship, Santo Steven, was transporting illegal timber between the port of Buenaventura and Palomino’s native region in the north of the Choco province.
Court records obtained by La Silla Vacia showed that Palomino’s brother Nelson was arrested on drug trafficking charges in September 2018, two months after counternarcotics police found 112 kilograms of marihuana on the ship.
A second raid resulted in the confiscation of 557 kilograms of marihuana, according to the navy website.
At the time of the raids and his brother’s arrest, Colombia’s top state defense official was the sole owner of the company Almep SAS, the registered owner of the Santo Steven, La Silla Vacia found.
Palomino sold the company in 2021 to a man called Luis Anibal Lozano, a long-time friend, according to a source of the website.
Lozano registered Palomino’s sister Yazmin as the company’s legal representative in March.
The ship’s current administrator, Ezequiel Caviedes, told a reporter of La Silla Vacia that the Santo Steven continues to be “of doctor Palomino, but I manage it.”
In one of his responses to questions, the ANDJE director stressed that the ship “has never been linked to any criminal process” and that the authorities that seized the ship “clarified that the ship and the company weren’t involved in any kind of illegal activity.”
Despite the arrest on drug trafficking charges, Palomino stressed that his brother “was never linked to illicit activities.”