Witness Testimony Key in Santander Corruption Trial

An attorney from Bogota, Colombia, Jaime Lombana has decades of experience in the legal profession as a criminal lawyer as founder and owner of Jaime Lombana Villalba & Abogados. In this role, Jaime Lombana has represented high-profile clients including Santander’s former secretary of infrastructure Claudia Yaneth Toledo.

This recent case involves the testimony of Toledo and her husband, Lenin Dario Pardo, given to the Supreme Court. This testimony is expected to become integral in exposing government corruption between civil servants who hold high office and Bogota contractors.

The testimony is part of a case involving an investigation of two government officials, Richard Aguilar and Edwin Ballesteros. The men are accused of being part of a criminal enterprise where they took bribes in exchange for handing out government contracts to a specific group of contractors. According to a January article in Noticias Caracol, the corruption enterprise´s paper trail was sophisticated in the way it reported payments to contractors and concealed bribes to officials.

Toledo’s testimony, in addition to the above evidence, is important to the case because the former secretary of infrastructure has given government prosecutors evidence related to videos, audio, conversations, and documents exposing the ex-governor (Aguilar) and ex-city manager (Ballesteros). The conversations, especially, expose Pardo’s involvement in the scheme that is alleged to involve more than 500 billion pesos. Moreover, the case is expected to highlight how entrenched pay-for-play business has become between Santander government officials and city contractors.

from WordPress https://ift.tt/3soWgJr
via IFTTT