President Juan Manuel Santos announced on Tuesday that the Colombian state faces 1 quadrillion pesos in lawsuits, the equivalent of $530 billion dollars.
Santos warned that if the government does not have an effective defense, then hypothetically every Colombian would have to pay $11.6 million out of their own pockets, or the government would have to approve 400 tax reforms to resolve the 260,000 lawsuits, Caracol Radio reported on Tuesday.
“What is obvious is that we have an overload of work in the legal services of the state,” Santos explained, “which has very limited technical capabilities and poor support systems, case management, and flaws that are reflected in very low success rates.”
To defend against the lawsuits Santos activated on Tuesday the Legal Defense Agency of the State, composed of a director general as well as an advisory board of three lawyers who will determine legal strategies in the different processes.
In the last 10 years, the state has lost $1.9 billion in lawsuits with a success rate of only 0.5%.
