“Pension reform was necessary, but not how it was processed”: Germán Vargas Lleras

In dialogue with La W, former vice president Germán Vargas Lleras spoke about the critics that has formulated several of the reforms promoted by the National Government, particularly the pension, which was approved in its first debates in Congress.

The text of this reform was approved in the House of Representativeswith a vote of 88 in favor and 20 against. Subsequently, the House decided not to study the articles but rather to approve what the Senate had sent to “pupitrazo”, according to its critics.

For this reason, former vice president Vargas Lleras warned in his El Tiempo column entitled ‘Everything was warned’ that the approval of this initiative would have serious consequences: “They did it in the worst and most crude way (…) violating, once again, the regulations of Congress and ignoring numerous rulings of the Constitutional Court”.

Vargas Lleras added that “if they wanted to avoid the reconciliation of the texts of both chambers“They achieved it, but they left the reform moribund.”

In La W, the former vice president reaffirmed that there was complicity from the money private in the silence by Santiago Montenegro, president of Asofondos. Thus, Vargas Lleras argued that the price of the agreement was to increase the commissions of these funds, which would have lowered the pressure they had.

It should be remembered that Montenegro has assured that they They are “neither quiet nor complacent” And that benefit even surprised them.

“Throughout this last year, the pension funds were active in specifying the public opinion and in Congress drawbacks of the reform (…) oh, surprise, when in this last vote only the Democratic Center, Cambio Radical and some parliamentarians abstained from voting on the reform in the previous days, no one mentioned anything again. It is curious that in the plenary session of the Chamber introduced modifications or discussions and it was simply accepted in an unconstitutional manner the text,” said former vice president Vargas Lleras.

Thus, Vargas Lleras considered that this reform is “well inconvenient due to extraordinary powers that are given to the president to reach nearly three million older people who have never saved a peso through subsidies”.

He also assured that, before this reform, the funds received a 0.3% commission, which was raised to 0.7%so “without a doubt they are going to increase and this number was not in the original project, but was introduced.”

For this reason, he assured that he fears that, in this case, “the same thing happened procedure that with the EPS“, because “over the course of a year, they made us all defend such expensive interests to realize in the end that there was negotiation”.

“This leaves the majority of parliamentarians very concerned that, over the course of a year, they attended to claims of the funds to then see that, in the end, they kept a very diligent silence regarding the texts already approved. Fortunately, they will go to constitutionality control and all We hope that, finally in this reform, the Court will make use of the powers that it itself approved.”, he indicated.

On the other hand, the former vice president also pointed out that this reform taxes pensions in Colombia for the first time: “Every Colombian who today has a pension of more than 1,000 UVT will be subject to significant liens on its pensions future (…) all Colombians who today enjoy a pension greater than three million pesos will begin to pay taxes as if they were labor income in progressive percentages that will go up to 39%”.

He also assured that, with this reform, the people will have to quote 150 more weekssince 1,300 more weeks of contributions are required.

“The pension funds are not going to end because They will continue managing the 400 billion pesos that they currently administer and will do so until each of those pensions materializes (…) I have always maintained that it was essential to make a tax reformColombia could not continue with a regime as unjust as the one we have where we allocate 60 billion pesos annually to basically subsidize the care that 1.7 million Colombians receive. The reform was necessary, but not in the way it was finally processed and approved,” he added.