12:03 AM
It seemed to Adriana Osorio that the best way to assert her rights as a buyer who felt defrauded in a business to purchase a car was to go to the Medellín Consumers League, but the paradoxical thing was that she ended up denouncing the lawyers who assisted her. in that entity whose mission is to defend citizens who feel helpless in commercial acts.
The story that put this 59-year-old retiree in a thousand spins for nearly $30 million that she had spent for a business began about three years ago; She already recovered that money but it was devalued and she couldn’t get it he was returned $2,100,000 that he paid for the expenses of legal representation which according to her was not effective because the lawyers lacked diligence.
According to Mrs. Osorio, in 2020 she was passing by a shopping center and the salespeople of a dealership convinced her to get involved in a “separate” plan to acquire a vehicle, one of those that consists of the interested party being included on a list of They wait with other applicants and access the credit as they are favored in a lottery.
In her case, that moment came in August 2022. She was informed that she had benefited from the financing but two things happened: that the Stepway of her dreams had gone from worth $53 million to $83 million, and that they told her that she could not make her right effective because she was reported to a risk center.
The curious thing, according to Carolina Gallego, their daughter, was that they had given that information at the beginning and they responded that there was no problem, because the transaction was not with a bank. Thus, out of the initial payment of $2,613,000, they managed to give another 38 installments of $721,000 for a total of $30,013,128.
That was when she went to the Consumer League, following the advice of a friend, motivated by the advertising they give to consumer leagues in the bulletin that appears on television, and thinking that they did not charge for attention.
According to Mrs. Osorio, the lawyer Ignacio Esneider Jaramillo, who serves as president of the League, explained to her that there was a cost, although less than what lawyers normally charged; that in this case the fee was $2,500,000, but for her, because she was the wife of a friend with whom he worked in the Ombudsman, he was going to leave it at $2,100,000.
According to the user, he also explained that the case would be handled by colleagues from the same office, who would make the claim to the concessionaire and the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce.
At that time she paid $1,100,000 in cash and in December she transferred the rest, even without seeing the first result of the management, at a request from Jaramillo, because she supposedly needed to pay rent. On that occasion the family asked for a record to demonstrate the progress in the process, but he told them that he did not like to reveal nothing until the judge delivered the ruling.
They later told him that he had not been able to file the claim. She alleged that her reason was that her daughters had not sent her medical records to prove that she suffered from visual weakness.
“He told me that he had won several similar cases and two years passed and he did not file a claim. I went almost daily (to his office) and they told me that this was already in court; At the end they ended up making strange excuses and didn’t attend to me. In the end, the secretary confessed to my daughter that they had not filed any lawsuit,” says Mrs. Osorio.
After that, Mrs. Adriana presented the complaint directly to the Superindustria and shortly afterward they called her from the car warehouse to return the money, practically complete although without a single peso for interest or indexation to the real value.
Then, she presented a right of petition to Jaramillo and he gave her proof of a claim before the Super, only that the date was several days after the action that she had filed before the same national agency. That is why he concluded that neither Jaramillo nor the other two lawyers who supposedly intervened in the matter had carried out the work for which they had been paid.
They complained to the Ombudsman and it referred the matter to the Sectional Commission for Judicial Discipline, the instance of the Judicial Branch that receives complaints of alleged bad practices by lawyers.
That instance issued an inhibitory ruling on November 28 that favored Jaramillo and his partners Karina Rivas and Luis Humberto Guidales, meaning that it refrained from advancing the case and therefore from expressing a substantive decision. The reason, in the case of the first two, is that in the file sent by the Ombudsman, no documents were included that demonstrated a contractual relationship with the client, and in the last one, it was that it was not properly identified in the claim.
Apart from that, the magistrate who investigated the case explained in the sentence a bizarre situation: that the procedure for which Mrs. Osorio sought her defendants did not require being a lawyer and therefore it was not clear if the alleged failure corresponded to the exercise of her profession.
When searching the platform of the Judicial Branch, EL COLOMBIANO found that, in addition to this one, Jaramillo has had three other complaints before the Disciplinary Commission between October 2021 and last April 26; However, when consulted by EL COLOMBIANO He repeated several times how successful it has been in the League, founded by him, with more than 4,000 cases won in 15 years of existence.
“It doesn’t destabilize me that they report me to the Commission because they also exonerate one of responsibility,” he said.
The truth is that there is at least one case in which he was sanctioned in the second instance with two months without being able to practice, in October 2022, following a complaint from a client who, similarly to Ms. Osorio, alleged that she hired him to process a membership process and this “did not begin the entrusted management.”
In this regard, Jaramillo maintained that he has sued the judge who ruled against him before the Attorney General’s Office and the Judiciary itself because, in his opinion, she made errors in the process.
In relation to Mrs. Osorio’s case, he stated that he acted diligently because, regardless of the client’s anxiety, the pace of a lawyer’s actions is set by procedural times and he was still within the deadline. Furthermore, he alleged that the reason for not having filed the lawsuit sooner was that Mrs. Osorio’s daughters refused to supply him the clinical history that was the “queen test” that she was blind and therefore the contract she signed with the dealer was flawed because it was not read out loud to her.
“I asked them a lot, because with that we gained rights, but they were blasé and rude, and chose to file another lawsuit,” he explained.
Likewise, Jaramillo maintains that if the dealer returned the money even without there being an order from the Superindustria to force him, it was because he threatened him with a lawsuit based on the argument of the user’s visual weakness. “I presume that they saw my arguments and that is why they returned the money,” he stressed.
Mrs. Osorio and her daughters, on the other hand, assert that he only filed the lawsuit when they sent him a petition requesting an explanation of what had happened and he had nothing to show.
