The majority of these companies belong to Martín Montiel Mendoza, who is close to Espedito Duque. Of those, just five companies, some of which had no prior experience with public markets, won 96 per cent of the total value. Their analysis shows that between 20, the Duque and Soto administrations signed 99 contracts with 13 businesspeople close to the Duque “clan,” contracts worth a combined $3 million dollars. Another, Renacer IPS SAS, represented by the son of a government employee who worked for Duque, obtained two contracts worth more than $75,000 dollars.Īs part of the Rafael Project, the Colombian investigative news outlet Cuestión Pública, which specialised in corruption and public abuse of power, and CLIP, a consortium of Latin American news outlets, picked up where Moreno left off. One, Serviexpress ATP SAS, was founded by an individual close to Duque’s wife, Julieth Arroyo Montiel. The 21-page alleges “various types of crimes against the public administration.” Moreno specifies the operative mechanism Duque put in place: creating “a certain number of structures” for his close friends and family and then contracting with them in order to “facilitate the appropriation of public resources.”Īmong the dozens of NGOs Moreno named in the complaint were two linked to Duque.

In Moreno’s email inbox, the SafeBox Network discovered a key document: a formal administrative complaint he had filed against Espedito Duque and his cronies for “acts of corruption, embezzlement of public funds, influence trafficking and clientelism” on January 5, 2021. In late September 2022, Moreno filmed himself, this time from what he believed to be the scene of the crime: a plot of land belonging to Carmen Aguas, the wife of Gabriel Calle, the patriarch of the Calle family – one of six families in the Cordoba area fighting over political influence.Ītiq murder: | Banda recalls boy next door who often got into trouble, left town week ago for ‘a job’ Through ground reporting, Moreno had discovered that dozens of trucks were being driven out to a river abutting a national park in Cordoba, where, he said, they pilfered sand for use in public construction projects. On October 7, 2022, Moreno started to share elements of the final investigation with the SafeBox Network team. Several days before his assassination, Moreno had been in contact with Forbidden Stories with the aim of joining the SafeBox Network, which allows threatened journalists to upload and protect their sensitive information. The man took out a revolver and fired three times at Moreno, killing him instantly. Months later, on October 16, 2022, just after 7 pm, Moreno was closing his bar and grill when a man wearing a baseball cap came into the restaurant. Three weeks prior to posting the video, Moreno found an anonymous note on his motorcycle, accompanied by a bullet.

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