As of February 1 this year, after long judicial disputes, the Ministry of Mines and Energy gave priority in the wholesale distribution of liquid fuels for the department of Nariño to the Petrodecol supply plant, located inside the Port Society. Regional Tumaco Pacific, and owned by Antioqueños Juan David Marulanda Cuartas and Harry Kahn Lerner, among others. The company that aims to import, export, store, refine and distribute hydrocarbons is going through a bad time and has just been accepted into the Reorganization Law by the Superintendence of Companies.
Petróleos y Derivados de Colombia – Petrodecol, the owner of 205 gas stations, was created in December 2016 by Andrés Tarquino, its current director and former governor of Nariño, together with Luis Ernesto Chaves Martinez, who was also president of the board of directors of Comercio of Nariño, a time when it promoted the border law that governs differential fuel prices, but ended up controlled by its current financial manager Juan David Marulanda Cuartas, plus Harry Kahn Lerner and Kamca Trading, owners of the Comercializadora Internacional Terra Bunkering SAS
Petrodecol’s gasoline distribution business is linked to the latest history of the Tumaco Port Society, they share the same partners who also have the particularity of not being from Nariño but from Antioquia.
Petrodecol is a subsidiary of Sociedad Portuaria Tumaco Pacific Port, which has 6 thousand square meters of storage warehouses, 3 thousand meters of general cargo yards and 33 thousand square meters of the port at the disposal of cargo operators. In this port, the cargo of different products moves such as: vegetable oil, cocoa, rice, coconut, potatoes, vegetables, among other provisions and groceries for internal consumption in the region, hydrocarbons such as gasoline, diesel, alcohol, cargoes of fertilizers and cereals among others.
In 1994, the port of Tumaco, which had been administered since 1948 by Colpuertos, was granted a concession to the Sociedad Portuaria Regional de Tumaco for 20 years and extended until 2017, at which time the Sociedad Portuaria Regional de Tumaco was liquidated to make way for a concession for 30 years delivered by the National Infrastructure Agency to the Tumaco Pacific Port Society in August 2017.
Two years earlier, in 2015, Petrodecol had entered into an agreement with the Regional Port Society to develop Phase I of its liquid fuel storage and distribution project. Later, it became a subsidiary of Tumaco Pacific Port.
The president of the Port of Tumaco is Harry Kahn Lerner, who joined the Sociedad Portuaria Regional Tumaco Pacific Port SA as a partner in 2016 when they chose to obtain the concession of the port in Tumaco from the National Infrastructure Agency. As main members of the board of directors of Tumaco Pacific Port are Juan David Marulanda Cuartas and Harry Kahn Lerner, as substitutes are his brother Fredy Kahn Lerner and Luis Ernesto Chaves Martinez from Nariño, who is also a partner in Petrodecol.
The fight they won to preserve gasoline distribution
The arrival of Petrodecol to Nariño was full of disputes, its wholesale distribution in the department took more than six years to carry out, since it included a change in the model of how fuel would arrive in the department. The proposal to bring gasoline by ship from Reficar in Cartagena, through the Panama Canal and store it in the port of Tumaco, occurred to a group of businessmen who identified this possibility to stop depending on the arrival of fuel by road. from Yumbo, and from Tumaco distribute it by land to the entire department.
The logistics of fuel supply to Nariño, before the construction of the Tumaco plant, began at the Barrancabermeja refinery with the transportation of fuel via multi-duct. This product was delivered to the supply plants of 5 wholesalers located in the municipality of Yumbo, Valle del Cauca, and, once there, it was transported to the service stations of the different municipalities of Nariño, since the promise was never fulfilled. that had been done to the department of the construction of an oil pipeline to Pasto.
One of the objectives when building the fuel supply plant in Tumaco was to allow dependence on gasoline that arrives by road from Yumbo, subject to blockages and closures due to landslides. The proposal was not well received by five companies that shipped fuel by land from Yumbo to Nariño, Terpel, Exxon Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, Biomax and Petromil.
The first argument they presented is that the Petrodecol plant does not have the capacity to supply and guarantee the reliability that is required. However, Petrodecol indicated that they were deploying the logistics operation that allows them to comply with their obligations. In the department, nearly 400,000 gallons of fuel are consumed daily, of which 65% are gasoline and 35% diesel.
The second argument is that the department of Nariño, because it is a border department, has had two tax benefits for many years, that of not paying national taxes (VAT, global and tariff) and the transportation subsidy from Yumbo to Pasto, by eliminating the latter. , gasoline would arrive more expensive at retail stations, since the subsidy or compensation paid by the government to the tankers that transport gasoline from Yumbo would drop from 411 to 280 pesos per gallon because between Tumaco and Pasto there are 276 kilometers of distance, compared to the 423 between Yumbo and the capital of Nariño. Although the manager of Prodecol, Tarquino indicated that, although the compensation will be less, the transporters will end up saving because on that route there is only one toll, while from Yumbo there are four.
And the third argument was the creation of a monopoly on gasoline transportation in Nariño, by including the Hydrocarbons Directorate of the Ministry of Mines and Energy in 2017 in first place of priority in the supply plan and in contingencies from the plant. of Zeuss Petroleum located in Cartago, Valle del Cauca.
The situation became so complicated that last year the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce – SIC launched an investigation against the Association of Retail Distributors of Fuel and Petroleum Derivatives of Nariño – Adiconar, and the distributors Organization Terpel, Chevron Petroleum Company, Biomax Combustibles and Primax of Colombia and 46 retail fuel distributors for allegedly preventing free competition in Nariño.
In the statement of objections, the SIC explained that the investigated organizations had prevented, through judicial and administrative actions, the entry of new wholesale distributors to Nariño. These actions include appeals before the Ministry of Mines and Energy, tutela and popular actions and lawsuits before contentious administrative judges.
The victorious exit of Prodecol allowed it to distribute gasoline to all the municipalities of Nariño, currently it has the largest number of service stations in the department, 205 of the 703 existing. The department with the most gas stations in the country due to the demand of the coca business, as expressed by the Minister of Finance Ricardo Bonilla himself.
However, after this tough fight from which it emerged victorious, the numbers have not favored the company that at the beginning of this year ceased payments and had overdue obligations of more than ninety days that amount to $103,179.4 million, therefore who requested to be admitted in the reorganization process to the Superintendence of Companies, a state in which he has been since January 24, 2024.
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