Just when the issue already seemed buried, EPM’s controversial lawsuit against the builders of Hidroituango was revived. After more than three years of silence, the Administrative Court of Antioquia admitted this action on June 13, whose claim amounts to at least $9.9 billion. The decision not only draws attention for its slow times, which legal experts do not hesitate to describe as scandalous, but also for putting EPM in an unthinkable scenario despite the fact that the insurance companies have already paid for the case and the work is already working.
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As if in some kind of quadrilateral, the utility company turned out to be belatedly pushed into a fight with the original builders of the hydroelectric projectin a battle that from the beginning has been questioned for having a more political than technical motivation.
And although until 2019 EPM itself defended before environmental authorities, control organizations and insurers that the emergency that put Hidroituango in check in 2018 was an unforeseeable accident, in 2020 the then recently arrived mayor of Medellín, Daniel Quintero , forced the company to give a shake-up and unleashed an unprecedented corporate crisis.
In August 2020, when Quintero presented the filing of that lawsuit as a fact, the EPM Board of Directors resigned in full, not only arguing that the mayor had ignored that body and violated corporate governance practices, but also that had put the entity in a scenario of unnecessary uncertainty. Among other things, because the person responsible for the construction is EPM itself, which subcontracted the work.
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At that time, despite the fact that the company had already been receiving the first insurance payments (on December 4, 2019, Mapfre had already disbursed a first payment of 150 million dollars, equivalent to $500,000 million at the then exchange rate) and the hydroelectric plant had already had reached crucial milestones such as the opening of the landfill, The lawsuit added to the company not only the worry of repairing the damaged work but also the worry of getting into a fight with its own builders.
While from the side of EPM the then general manager Álvaro Guillermo Rendón (who later fought with Quintero) argued that the lawsuit was the result of an eight-month legal study in which it had been concluded that the builders had acted in bad faith, these The latter maintained that in the project a leaf was never moved without the supervision and approval of EPM and that its technical instructions, including the acceleration plan with which the collapsed Auxiliary Diversion Gallery (GAD) was built, had been completely complied with. of the letter before and after the emergency.
Keep reading: The million-dollar lawsuit that EPM will initiate for damages in Hidroituango
Then Rendón ended up resigning and privately questioned the lawsuit. It should be remembered that on January 9, 2021, EPM and the builders had a first confrontation before the Attorney General’s Office in which they ruled out the possibility of reaching an agreement.
Then, on January 12, 2021, EPM officially filed the lawsuit before the Administrative Court of Antioquia, which in a order of March 11, 2021 decided to disadmit it for finding errors of substance and form.
Among the errors found by the court, the lack of annexes to support the claims, inconsistencies in the amounts demanded by EPM from the defendants and even a lack of clarity in the regulations cited in the lawsuit stood out.
Although in that first order the court gave EPM a period of ten days to file an appeal for reconsideration, which was in fact filed, time began to run and the court never ruled.
During that long silence, the Comptroller General of the Republic issued a ruling on a liability process that had begun in 2019 and the insurers paid for the policy, the government of Daniel Quintero agreed with them to pay half of what they had to pay 983 million. of dollars (about 4.3 billion pesos out of 9 billion pesos) and there was even a change of government.
And now it turns out that, on February 24 of this year, a judicial attorney, Jaime Humberto Zuluaga Ángel, decided to send a letter to the Court with the subject: “Review of process and procedural impulse.” It was in response to that request that the court finally decided to admit the claim.
To find out their analysis of the issue, EL COLOMBIANO consulted with both EPM and the former builders of Hidroituango, but until the closing of this edition they did not refer to the future of that process.
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