KVIG Informative

Abelardo de la Espriella’s government hired the trust company that will manage earthquake reconstruction money without open competition. It will pay 248.6 million pesos a month, with no end date.

Colombia’s Finance Ministry picked Fiducoldex, the Colombian Foreign Trade Trust Company, through direct contracting to set up and run the Fondo Milagro, or Miracle Fund. The fund is the vehicle created to finance reconstruction after the magnitude 7.4 earthquake of August 10, Vanguardia reported. Fiducoldex will receive about 248.6 million pesos a month, before VAT, under contract 6.001-2026, formalized October 5.

The contract has no end date: its term is open-ended for as long as the emergency response lasts. Over a year, the payments add up to nearly 3 billion pesos. Using the exchange rate implied by the official reconstruction estimate, 30 trillion pesos or about $9.5 billion, that is roughly $79,000 a month.

Fiducoldex will administer the trust assets and represent them legally, but it will not hold the money. The funds stay in the Single National Account under Treasury control until disbursement conditions are met. The president named Jaime Uribe Tamayo as the fund’s manager, and he will have a Management Unit to plan projects, select suppliers, supervise contracts and validate payments.

Every payment passes through four hands: an overseer certifies performance, the Management Unit validates, the manager authorizes and Treasury orders the transfer. Fiducoldex must keep the books, file monthly reports and account for its work every six months. The fund will have an independent audit and oversight from the Comptroller General’s Office.

The government added 624.656 billion pesos to the 2026 national budget through Decree 1488 of October 6 to back the fund. Loans, domestic and international donations, contributions from local governments and private money can be added on top. The preliminary cost of reconstruction is about 30 trillion pesos.

Oversight matters because of the precedent. On August 18, the De la Espriella government itself handed prosecutors a report accusing the National Disaster Risk Management Unit of losing track of more than 1 trillion pesos under Gustavo Petro. Petro answered that the items in the report are public policies, not crimes.

The scale of the damage explains the urgency. According to the National Disaster Risk Management Unit, cited by EFE, the quake left 331 dead, 4,505 injured and 111 missing. It also destroyed 36,326 homes and damaged 202,002 across 498 municipalities in 16 departments. Of the country’s 13,700 schools, 4,313 were damaged.

Congress has already demanded results. At a follow-up session on September 9, Representative Astrid Sánchez of Chocó summed up the complaint in one line: “We don’t need announcements, we need effectiveness.” Representative Edgar Gómez Castillo said more than 12,000 homes were affected in Cauca and that the government has not had enough presence there. Senator María Irma Noreña of the La U party cited Pereira, where Vanguardia reported 2,000 bricks arrived, an amount she described as too little to build a single house.

Lawmakers also asked Housing Minister Jaime Andrés Beltrán to explain how the Miracle Fund will operate and how it will guarantee transparency in handling the money. That question remains open. The fund now has a contract, a manager, a decree and an auditor on paper, but no rebuilt home yet that the contract allows anyone to count.

Fiducoldex’s contract has no expiration date. The 36,326 destroyed homes have no replacement date either. What the contract doesn’t fix is the one number that matters: how many of those homes get replaced, and by when.