John Camargo, head of the State Legal Defense Agencywas notified from Washington (United States)that Colombia won the lawsuit filed against it regarding the Meritage drug property, on the outskirts of the city of Medellín, according to what EL TIEMPO’s Investigative Unit learned.
The plaintiffs were asking for 300 million dollars, nearly one billion pesos.. “It is the first time in history that a country has managed to gain the Essential Security Exception, meaning that the state can adopt legitimate asset forfeiture measures to protect a country’s assets from a scourge such as drug trafficking.“, he told Camargo exclusively to EL TIEMPO.
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Camargo assured that said notification came to him directly from the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) based in the American capital: “I was notified that Colombia had won everything“.
John Camargo, acting director general of the National Agency for the Legal Defense of the State.
Private file
The legal suit against the country occurred after the investor Angel Seda He claimed that he had lost the multimillion-dollar injection of money he had made into the mega-project after the Attorney General’s Office launched a process of domain extinction due to links with drug traffickers.
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EL TIEMPO was able to reveal at the time the links of the mega property with Héctor Restrepo Santamaría, alias ‘Perraloca’, Javier García, alias ‘Maracuyá’among others.
Ximena Herrera, a lawyer from the office that represented Colombia in the US (Gaillard Banifatemi Shelbaya Disputes); John Camargo, head of the agency, and Giovanny Vega.
Supplied
Until a few weeks ago, It was thought that Colombia would have to assume the payment of 300 million dollars (more than a billion pesos) to the American citizen Ángel Samuel Seda and its partners in the real estate project Meritage.
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However, the agency, headed by Camargo, managed to give this dispute a ‘turn of the wheel’, thus achieving a historic and unprecedented ruling.
Ximena Herrera, lawyer from the office that represented the country in the United States (Gaillard Banifatemi Shelbaya Disputes); Camargo and Giovanny Vega, director of international affairsled the country’s defense.
The lawsuit began to get ‘tangled’ when several testimonies from former bosses were transferred to the file that benefited the plaintiff and even a recording of the then prosecutor Ana Catalina Noguera, where she was told that she was a bona fide third party. and that there could be an act of corruption surrounding the case.
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Ángel Seda, founder and CEO of Royal Property Group.
Royal Property Group
Noguera is the same one who was prosecuted for requesting the illegal interception of a telephone through the Former drug lord Carlos Ramon Zapatawho also ended up testifying in this case.
BRIEFCASE
*With information from EL TIEMPO – INVESTIGATIVE UNIT
