Petro said last Friday in Seville that when they elected Germán Bahamón as manager of the National Federation of Coffee Growers they put their fingers in his mouth, the president of the republic. Reasons are not lacking.
I commented on some of them here or on my twitter account because they were too protruding, but perhaps the most obvious was ignoring the twitter that one day before his election he sent to the Coffee Congress asking them to postpone the decision to elect the Federation’s manager until the new ministers of Finance and Agriculture, who are part of the National Committee of Coffee Growers by law, are sworn in.
The coffee growers, defending an ancient feudal criterion that they are independent, have insisted that they are a private union, denying the inherent fiscal responsibilities because the Federation administers and spends, and sustains, the National Coffee Fund, a parafiscal tax owned by the nation .
But regardless of that and with all due respect to President Petro, I think they put more than their fingers in his mouth. And I say this because Mr. Bahamón did not inform the Committee that he was making the pre-selection that he has 5 tax processes pending in the Bogotá Comptroller’s Office for almost 5 billion pesos and that, for one of them, an embargo was ordered on an apartment in the building Torremolinos in Neiva, which on the date of his election was still in force.
Of course, Bahamón has not been sentenced, but he did not report these details with the same freshness with which he tried to disrupt his relationship with the coffee manufacturing company, Agroprincipado, certified by the Neiva Chamber of Commerce, presenting a certificate from an accountant that there no income was presented that would disqualify him from being elected manager.
Perhaps, as the former mayor of Pereira, Álvaro Ramírez González, said in his column, the mess that the coffee growers are in with President Petro can only be solved with Bahamón’s resignation.
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