Between January and May of this year, the Cali Mobility Secretariat and the Automotive Diagnostic Center detected an increase in exonerations for payment of fines for traffic violations by 150%, compared to the same period last year.
This unusual behavior caught the attention of the Mobility Secretariat and officials of the Automotive Diagnostic Center who In a joint effort between the Cali mayor’s office, the Attorney General’s Office, the Attorney General’s Office and the Comptroller General’s Office, they managed to identify a series of alleged irregularities in the process of exoneration of summonses.
According to information from the district mayor’s office, starting last April a series of administrative actions were initiated to mitigate this fact, accompanied by an internal investigation process.
It was also indicated, “that it was possible to identify nearly 50,000 fines that would have been exonerated, apparently, irregularly so far in 2024 (…). In the month of May alone, more than 15,000 waived fines were identified for a value of more than 12,000 million pesos.” This is what a statement from the Mayor’s Office says.
These findings, according to the Mobility Secretariat, are added to the complaint that had been investigated by the Attorney General’s Office, starting in 2018, when there were already questions from the mayor of the time, Maurice Armitage. The 2018 complaint now ended with three career officials detained.
The mayor of Cali, Alejandro Eder, expressed his firm rejection of these alleged acts of corruption: “Public resources are sacred and we will not tolerate any form of corruption. This is a clear message for everyone: we will not allow anyone to take advantage of their position to enrich themselves at the expense of citizens.” In the district’s Mobility Secretariat and in the Mayor’s Office they indicated that “the Cali mayor’s office is committed to transparency and accountability.”
“The mayor’s office of Santiago de Cali, committed to integrity, has made the corresponding complaints to the competent entities, finding that this complaint is added to one that the Attorney General’s Office already had since 2018 and that ended with the arrest of three career civil servants,” reads the information provided by the Administration.
At the agency they also said: “We have been forceful, since all equipment controls increased. But it does not mean that all summonses are due to surgery, but such a high figure is not normal,” they pointed out in this department.
At the Mobility Secretariat they explained that the three captured people come from the 2018 process and have no relationship with the findings of the first five months of this year.
