Colombia’s Inspector General Alejandro Ordoñez said that there were contradictions and irregularities in Congressman Yidis Medina’s case that led to his decision to aquit the case.
Ordoñez was responding to the investigation opened against him by the Supreme Court, following his decision not to pursue his predecessor’s investigation into government officials bribing congressmen but would start anew. A lawsuit was filed by opposition Congressman German Navas Talero of Polo Democratico.
Ordoñez said that procedural rules were not respected in the transferral of Medina’s investigation to the Supreme Court. He said it would have been “a sin” had he not observed this and other irregularities within the decision, in which he absolved of all responsibility the Minister of Social Protection, Diego Palacio and former Minister of the Interior and Justice, now ambassador to Italy, Sabas Pretelt de la Vega.
“It was the bringing of [Medina’s] case before the Supreme Court that was not only [wrong] because it did not repsect procedural rules, but also when it was subject to ratification the Court refused, fearing self-incrimination,” daily El Espectador reported Ordoñez as saying.
Similarly, he said that the former Conservative MP himself who denied having been bribed for his support of President Alvaro Uribe’s first re-election. After that declaration, Ordoñez said, someone else was in charge of the Inspector General’s Office, and it was when the archive was reordered that the challenge was raised leading to the reopening of the case.
“In the disciplinary proceedings Medina’s denial of receiving bribes, under the penalty of perjury, appeared. It was the management of the Inspector General’s Office at that time, and not mine, that ordered the case closed,” said Ordoñez.
The Inspector General said that he had the full confidence to go ahead. He said that the Supreme Court’s investigation into him was a natural response into a citizen’s concern, as they must. He rejected the suggestion that it was a retaliation to the disagreements he has publicly had with rulings of the Court, and said that this type of complaint was much more common than the public thought.