The Inspector General’s office opened a preliminary investigation into a meeting that took place between Partido de la U presidential candidate Juan Manuel Santos and the president of Colombia’s Union of Registrar Workers, Daniel Bohorquez, 48 hours before the presidential elections.
The inspector general intends to look into the meeting to establish if there was “a breach of discipline,” reports El Tiempo.
We will “collect information, evidence and circumstances, to see how these meetings developed and to assess whether to further investigate,” said the inspector general, Alejandro Ordonez.
Ordonez warned that if the Registrar official was involved in politicking, he would be punished by “the full weight of the law.”
Colombia’s registrar, Ariel Sanchez, said that the meeting did not take place in the registrar’s office, and said that the situation was “very worrying.”
Santos’ campaign team admitted that the presidential candidate and the union leader had had lunch together, but said the aim of the meeting was to “express the necessity of a commitment from the entity’s workers that the voting next Sunday and the following steps of the electoral process be taken as efficiently as possible and with absolute transparency.”
Following Colombia’s congressional elections in March, Bohorquez criticized the transport of ballot papers to Bogota for counting, adding that if the same were to happen in the presidential elections, results would take weeks to establish.
The Registry and National Election Council were both heavily criticized for their handling of the congressional election March 14.
