Archive image of the Colombian Attorney General’s office logo in Bogota, Colombia. March 1, 2019. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez/File

Between 2014 and 2015, the lawyer Christopher Armando Maya Quintero demanded the reliquidation of the so-called “grace pension” of at least 41 teachers – settled in Cundinamarca -, managing the false certifications before the Parafiscal and pension management unit (Ugpp)in a new attempt to defraud the Colombian pension system.

This would have been determined by a criminal court of knowledge, after having read the evidence collected by the prosecutor’s office against Maya Quintero.

There grace pensionit should be specified, grants special remuneration to official teachers who have completed 50 years of age and 20 years of service in municipal, departmental, district or nationalized institutions, “provided they demonstrate that they have taught with honesty, efficiency and consecration”, without this excluding the possibility of benefiting from other financial advantages.

In a press release, the investigative body said that “a prosecutor from the Specialized Anti-Corruption Directorate demonstrated that Maya Quintero took the documents filed with the office of the Governor of Cundinamarca to support the certifications that represented Salary changes for the benefit of teachers. For these illegal maneuvers, the lawyer received payments from pensioners who entrusted him with their claims.

This way he managed to get one of the professors he represented to receive a payment above his salary factor, so 27,229,451 pesos. In the meantime, the other requests were rejected, after the UGPP corroborated that part of the information in the documents was false.

These inconsistencies led to the opening of an investigation which, seven years later, resulted in the conviction of Maya Quintero for the offenses of material falsification of a public document, procedural fraud and attempted fraud. The lawyer was sentenced to 15 years and 10 months in prisonhe was disabled for the exercise of public rights and functions and, in addition, will have to pay a fine of 260 SMIC laws in force, just over 338 million, as decided in first instance.

He Ministry of Labourat the head of Gloria Ines Ramirezrefines the final details of the pension reform with unions, experts and unions, to present it to Congress on March 16, the day of the start of the second period of ordinary sessions of the legislature.

To this day, we are talking about a pillar systemin which the two regimes, public and private, will become one and complement each other.

As the Minister announced in an interview for El Tiempo, only 1 in 5 people of retirement age manage to access a pension, therefore the first of these pillars will be in charge of national budgetto guarantee an income to those who are not part of the contributory scheme, making this benefit universal.

The second pillar envisages a new contribution systemin which every worker who earns more than four minimum wages must contribute to Colpensiones, although he can choose the fund of his choice.

And the third and final pillar will be voluntary savingsfor those who can and want to complete their retirement.

With this, diets Prima Media (rpm)of a public nature, and Solidarity Individual Savings (Rais), private. Instead, they will complement each other.

However, the more than 18 million members of private funds will have to switch to Rpm, to release new resources that will benefit “some 3,600,000 Colombians. Major adults that they are in poverty and that in most cases they live on the charity of their children”, since they have no pension, explained the minister to the aforementioned media.

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