The electoral authority opened an investigation against Petro’s campaign for alleged irregular financing after leaked audios from one of his closest collaborators, Armando Benedetti, former Colombian ambassador in Caracas, who evokes in one of them an alleged irregular contribution of 15,000 million pesos (US$3.5 million). The Prosecutor’s Office is already investigating the case.
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Armando Benedetti and the former right-hand man of the president, Laura Sarabia, who was serving as chief of staff, will have to answer to the National Electoral Council on July 13 for “alleged irregularities in the financing” of Petro’s campaign, the agency said. Benedetti, 55, and Sarabia, 29, who belonged to the president’s close circle, were removed from the government on Friday when a domestic robbery became a state scandal.
The case began at the end of May after the theft of a briefcase with thousands of dollars from Sarabia’s house (US 7,000, according to her). The former chief of staff’s nanny ended up being interrogated with a polygraph at Casa de Nariño, the presidential headquarters, and then the police intercepted her telephone conversations, as well as those of another domestic employee, using a false police report that linked them to drug traffickers from the Gulf Clan. Sarabia and Benedetti shared the same babysitter and accuse each other of conspiracy.
From 8,000 for Samper to 15,000 for Petro
Semana magazine published some recordings in which Benedetti is heard angry and threatening Sarabia with revealing illegal financing to Petro’s campaign for some 3.5 million dollars, 15,000 million pesos, and assures that if they did, they would all go to the jail.
“Laura (…) We all sink. We’re all finished. We’re going to jail (…) With so much shit that I know, well we all screw ourselves, if you screw me, I’ll screw you,” they say the audios flooded with madrazos, attributed to the former ambassador and in which his interlocutor is not heard.
Colombian journalists have baptized this scandal “case 15,000”, in reference to the notorious “case 8,000”, the financing of the presidential campaign of Ernesto Samper by the Cali Cartel in 1994.
Benedetti was one of the main coordinators of the campaign of the first left-wing president in the history of Colombia. She even boasts of having been the one who led him to the presidency thanks to the contributions, obtained irregularly, which multiplied the votes on the Caribbean Coast.
Petro defends himself
The president assured on Twitter that the government has not ordered “telephone tapping, or illegal raids (…) nor has money been received from people linked to drug trafficking in the campaign.”
“I do not accept blackmail, nor do I see politics as a space for personal favors,” he added, and expressed his solidarity with Sarabia for receiving “enormous pressure.”
In a message on Twitter, the former ambassador assured that the audios revealed by Semana “have been manipulated” and asked “excuses to the president” and to Sarabia “for the aggression and malicious attack.” In response, Petro asked him to “explain his words before the prosecution and the country.”
Alfonso Prada, ambassador in Paris, is one of those splashed
Of the former Minister of the Interior, appointed Colombian ambassador to France, Alfonso Prada, Armando Benedetti says in one of the leaked audios that “the entire ministry was stolen with the woman.”
He also reproaches Laura Sarabia for having given Prada a better position than him, despite the fact that the former Interior Minister had never worked with her and, above all, “did not campaign ass”, unlike him, that he did hold a hundred meetings, as he states in another passage.
Given this, the former minister announced on Twitter that he had “reported Armando Benedetti’s statements to the Prosecutor’s Office” and that he had requested that Public Ministry “open an investigation against him for the false accusations.”
In the complaint Prada also says that “We always work with total transparency and dedicate all our efforts so that there is no room for corruption. Witnesses all in the Ministry. Filed at dawn today in the Prosecutor’s Office by our lawyer Dr Andrés Garzón Roa ” .
Other senior Colombian government officials involved in this case are former Senator Roy Barreras and the current Minister of the Interior, Luis Fernando Velasco.
