Controversy Surrounds Medellín Mayor’s Office Housing Loans for Officials

A handful of senior officials and former officials from the era of former mayor Daniel Quintero ended up finding in the Medellín Mayor’s Office an ideal platform to access million-dollar housing loans from the city’s coffers.

Regardless of their connection with multiple complaints that have arisen in recent years, several bishops of the former president who came to the District as freely appointed and removed officials – many even already outside the cabinet – appear in the official lists of said program.

Although the application and access of said officials to these credits would not constitute a violation of the law, the program has come under public scrutiny due to several factors that arouse suspicion, ranging from situations such as the Mayor’s Secretary of Human Management , Ingrid Vanessa González Montoya, appears as one of the beneficiaries of the loans (despite being the official who heads the committee that is responsible for approving or denying them) and even specific cases of several officials who, after receiving the disbursement of the same They fled in disarray.

A controversial agreement also appears on the radar that was approved this year by the Medellín Council, led by Secretary González Montoya, in which the conditions of these credits, which were already soft from the start compared to commercial banking, were changed to be even more favorable.

Loans at full hands

The controversy over the management of the Mayor’s housing credit program came to the surface in the middle of this year, after Medellín councilor Alfredo Ramos Maya made public the response to a May 23 petition in which the Medellín Human Management Secretariat cut accounts of these credits during the last four years.

According to the figures provided by that agency, between 2020 and the first half of 2023, the District had received at least 1,582 loan applications, the amount of which in May amounted to $302,456 million.

Given that the program is aimed at all types of Mayor’s employees, ranging from long-time technicians to official workers, during said period the Human Management report noted that, of those requests, 820 corresponded to career officials. administrative, 311 to provisional civil servants, 35 to official workers, 12 to pensioners and 42 to freely appointed and removed civil servants.

Of that total of 1,582 applications, the data showed that 1,244 were approved, only 245 were rejected and 93 were in the approval process on that date.

In the midst of this sea of ​​requests, Ramos asked specifically about the loans approved for freely appointed and removed officials, receiving in response a list with the names of 17 current and former officials.

The most important name on the list is that of the secretary herself Ingrid Vanessa González Montoya, who according to the document had the blessing of his own secretariat to access a loan of $204 million, approved on October 7, 2022 and that at the date of issuance of the official document it was in the legalization process.

At that time, as EL COLOMBIANO recorded, while González was waiting for the disbursement of his credit, he was promoting a controversial draft agreement in the Council in which he proposed reducing the interest rates on these credits, increasing the amounts maximum allowed and eliminate other restrictions, such as one that required that those who accessed them must live in the home purchased on behalf of that program. Regardless of the alerts that were then raised, the initiative was sanctioned on June 29 as Municipal Agreement 83, lowering interest rates from 3% to 1.5% annually, raising the maximum amounts allowed from 98 current municipal monthly minimum wages (SMMMV) to 125, and modifying the article that required the beneficiary’s family group to live in the property financed with the public resources of Medellín.

When asked about these modifications, Secretary González argued in a written response that she supposedly did not have any conflict of interest, arguing that these modifications had been promoted at the request of the Mayor’s unions.

“I was not part of that committee, the Undersecretary of Human Management attended on my behalf, who by competency is a natural member, but she stepped aside when deciding on my credit, as stated in the respective minutes,” González also expressed to the be questioned about that peculiar situation in which she appears as the leader of the secretariat that grants the credits and was the beneficiary of them simultaneously.

In addition to González, other freely appointed and removed officials did not miss the opportunity to obtain credits from the Mayor’s Office. According to the list provided by the district administration itself, names appear such as Alethia Carolina Arango Gil, Diana Cecilia Ramírez Alvarez, Daniela Cardona Duque, among many others.

In the case of Arango Gil, for example, the records show that he obtained a loan for $204 million, approved on October 7, 2022 and that it was in the legalization process at the time of the preparation of the Human Management document.

In addition to being remembered for being director of the Dagrd at the beginning of the quadrennium, Arango Gil also held other positions, among which the undersecretary of Defense and Public Protection stands out, from where, paradoxically, she was the protagonist of a controversy because a couple of vehicles of the District assigned to their service were being used for personal errands, despite being paid with public resources to guarantee the fulfillment of their public functions.

In a heated discussion that then took place in the Medellín Council, the forms were made public in which the movements of those official vehicles to places such as Ciudad del Río, Loma de San Julián and La Aguacatala were recorded in the early hours of the morning. tomorrow and not to his office in La Alpujarra.

Regardless of these controversies, and with her housing loan already approved, Gil left the Mayor’s Office and in May of this year she landed in the Petro government, being appointed as deputy director for Risk Reduction of the National Unit for Risk Management. Disaster Risk (UNGRD).

For their part, Ramírez Álvarez and Cardona Duque, who saw their requests approved, also later abandoned their positions.

While Ramírez Álvarez, sister of the former Secretary of Social Inclusion Juan Pablo Ramírez (Juan Carlos Upegui’s mayoral campaign manager), had a $204 million loan approved in October 2022. A month later, on November 29, 2022, she left her position as advisor in the Mayor’s Office, according to Sigep records.

Similarly, Cardona Duque, who worked as manager of Human Mobility, obtained a loan of the same amount as Ramírez, which was disbursed on May 16, long after his departure from his job was known in October 2022. cargo to land at the Mayor’s Office of Itagüí.

To find out its version of this situation, this newspaper consulted with the Mayor’s Office of Medellín since last Friday, October 10, but until the closing of this edition it did not receive a response.