The Attorney General’s Office formally accused Nicolás Petro Burgos, charging him before a court with the crimes of illicit enrichment and money laundering, and called him to trial.
The eldest of Petro’s sons had his first formal hearing this Thursday, that of charging charges, for the process that persecutes him and for which he was arrested last July along with his ex-wife Daysuris Álvarez for having, allegedly, received money from dubious businessmen for his father’s electoral campaign.
“The Attorney General’s Office accuses and charges you, Nicolás Petro Burgos, with intent and as the author of the crime of illicit enrichment and as co-author of the crime of money laundering by (…) increasing the assets in an unjustified manner for himself and for another,” said the prosecutor Mario Burgos this Thursday before a court in Barranquilla (capital of the Atlantic, north).
Petro Burgos’s defense tried to request the annulment of the accusation of illicit enrichment, alleging that there was “nocausal link between the status of public official and his unjustified increase in assets“.
However, the judge rejected the annulment request and gave the Prosecutor’s Office the turn to formally present charges.
Now the Prosecutor’s Office will have to prove in the trial that the former deputy of the Atlantic Assembly received money from people suspected of having ties to drug trafficking or corruption, such as Samuel Santander Lopesierra, alias ‘the Marlboro man’, and Gabriel Hilsaca to enrich himself personally and finance Gustavo Petro’s presidential campaign in 2022.
But during the hearing this Thursday, prosecutor Burgos assured that the president’s son “had expenses above the amount he should have received as a deputy,” since only the sum of the rent (rent) of two apartments and a house in a month, plus the initial payment for the purchase of another house and monthly payments in various warehouses totaled 1,450 million pesos (367,500 dollars or about 335,000 euros).
However, by 2022, as a deputy, according to the prosecutor’s account, he only had 280 million pesos per year (about 71,000 dollars or 64,700 euros).
In addition, the Prosecutor’s Office also advanced in this hearing that Petro Burgos “hid and covered up” sums of up to 500 million pesos (126,700 dollars or 115,000 euros) of bundles of money delivered by personalities such as Máximo Noriega, a coastal leader accused of being the intermediary between alleged drug traffickers and the money that Petro’s son received.