KVIG Informative

Abelardo de la Espriella has been Colombia’s president for twelve days. He has already handed prosecutors, the inspector general and the comptroller a 135-page document alleging 82 corruption cases from the government that just left office. Gustavo Petro says none of it amounts to a crime.

President Abelardo de la Espriella delivered a document titled “El Libro de la Verdad” (The Book of Truth) to the Attorney General’s Office on Tuesday, August 18. The 135-page report compiles 82 cases his government flags as possible acts of corruption during Gustavo Petro’s administration (2022-2026). The same text went to the Inspector General’s Office and the Comptroller General’s Office, so both agencies can determine whether disciplinary or fiscal liability exists.

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The report’s most-cited finding is what it calls a “parallel payroll”: the outgoing government allegedly signed roughly 900,000 service-contract agreements, a financial commitment of nearly 15 trillion pesos, according to the document. De la Espriella also alleged that more than 1 trillion pesos went untracked at the National Disaster Risk Management Unit, a finding that carries extra weight because that agency is leading the response to the August 10 earthquake: the report says only 4.3% of the $5 billion allocated during Petro’s term was actually executed.

The document also flags the Colombia Mayor program, whose budget reportedly ran out between January and July of 2026, putting care for roughly three million senior citizens at risk, and a 6.8 trillion peso allocation for basic health teams that was never fully executed. Another chapter addresses the power utility Air-e, which went from 2.22 trillion pesos in equity in 2023 to a deficit of 377.66 billion pesos in 2025, with accumulated losses of 2.5 trillion pesos during the outgoing administration.

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“The country wants to know who allowed the disaster, who benefited from the plunder and who let it happen,” De la Espriella said while presenting the report, on Colombia’s National Day Against Corruption. According to the president, the country’s debt level reached 61% of GDP, the highest in Colombia’s history. “I am not asking the justice system for a pre-emptive conviction,” he clarified. “I am handing over information so you can find the truth of what happened.”

Vice President José Manuel Restrepo, who coordinated the new government’s anti-corruption transition team, defended the decision to mix criminal allegations with management criticism in a single document. “Not all of them are necessarily subject to investigation by the Attorney General’s Office, but they are acts that do not represent good management of public affairs,” he told Blu Radio. Restrepo said the report presented so far is only the first of several his team is preparing.

Gustavo Petro dismissed the report’s weight the next day. “There is no forensic book delivered by Abelardo to the Attorney General’s Office. These are 23 items that are public policies we defended and are not crimes,” he wrote on X, a figure that contrasts with the 82 cases De la Espriella’s own government cites. The former president, who left office August 7, demanded that every minister from his former cabinet “respond immediately” to the allegations. “Wherever there is a crime, let the punishment fit it,” he added.

Former Pacto Histórico presidential candidate Iván Cepeda, who lost the June 21 runoff to De la Espriella, questioned the document’s origin: according to Cepeda, the information was gathered during meetings of the failed transition handoff between the two governments’ teams, after Petro and De la Espriella chose not to meet face to face as the transition closed.

According to De la Espriella, the Attorney General has announced a special unit to investigate the report’s findings on criminal grounds. None of that resolves the underlying dispute: one government says it handed over proof of state plunder; the other says it handed over public policy dressed up as crime. Between the two versions sit 900,000 contracts, a trillion untracked pesos, and a country that, twelve days into the handover, is already debating whether the new government is governing or litigating against the one that left.