Due to alleged irregularities, the Attorney General’s Office annulled official letters 3571 and 3572 of July 10, 2023, requesting the transfer of the businessman, Emilio Tapia, from the El Bosque Penitentiary, where he is being held, to the Francisco Javier Vergara Military Battalion and Velasco in Malambo, Atlantic.
The letters were addressed to the commander of the National Army Personnel Command, Brigadier General Jaime Eduardo Torres Ramírez, and to the commander of the Engineer Battalion No. 2, General Vergara y Velasco de Malambo, Atlántico, Lieutenant Colonel Mauricio Calvo Restrepo.
With this order, the communications issued by the university professional, Óscar Obeso Hernández of the Barranquilla Prosecutor’s Office, who, according to the Public Ministry, without authorization, requested compliance with court orders, are rendered null and void.
In the same way, the control entity announced that the file will be transferred to the Special Agency that has been processing everything related to the guardianship filed by Tapia’s relatives so that it can be removed from that detention center.
Faced with this situation, the Public Ministry ordered an investigation against the official for questions of irregularities in these events.
It should be remembered that last May, Tapia was accused by the Prosecutor for his alleged participation in different acts of corruption identified in the process and execution of contracts that were followed in two different public entities.
In this way, a prosecutor from the Specialized Directorate against Corruption grouped three processes that were being followed against Tapia Aldana, in which similar illegal maneuvers were revealed to keep public contracts and appropriate resources destined to cover citizen needs. .
Case ‘Populated Centers’
Two of the events attributed to the defendant are related to contract 1043 of 2020, signed between the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications (MinTic) and the temporary union ‘Centros Poblados’, which intended to bring Internet to 7,000 schools rural.
Tapia Aldana would have contacted two people to provide the names, experience and financial capacity of their companies to form the temporary union. In exchange, he would pay them 4,000 million pesos. In this way, ‘Centros Poblados’ was constituted, tendered and, with false information about its conformation, misled the MinTic officials who awarded it the contract.
These entities would not have any participation in the contract, but their presence was decisive to meet the essential requirements to guarantee the award of the million-dollar tender.
Subsequently, the accused today, apparently, learned of the obtaining of false policies to support before MinTic the seriousness of the offer, the signing of the contract and receiving a disbursement of 70,000 million pesos, as an advance.
In the investigation it was learned that Emilio Tapia Aldana received 6,182 million pesos from the initial resources delivered to the temporary union. Of this sum, allegedly, he sent 1,118 million pesos to the owners of the companies that sold the experience of their companies. The rest, just over 5,064 million, would have been used for expenses not included in the investment plan such as the purchase of works of art, apartments, air tickets, high-end vehicles, and the payment of attorneys’ fees.
For these facts, the Prosecutor’s Office accused him of the crimes of embezzlement by aggravated appropriation, procedural fraud and ideological falsehood in a private document.