The Colombian Attorney General’s Office has formally charged Miguel Andrés Quintero Calle, brother of former Medellín mayor Daniel Quintero, with corruption tied to six contracts worth $17.657 billion between the Área Metropolitana del Valle de Aburrá and the Cuerpo de Bomberos Voluntarios de Itagüí. Signed from 2019 to 2023, these agreements were supposed to improve emergency response, risk reduction, and training—including COVID-19 supply distributions, but prosecutors allege they were awarded fraudulently with exaggerated costs.
Investigators claim the contracts included dubious payments for transport services and mobile phone top-ups that were never delivered. Quintero Calle, who never held public office, allegedly manipulated key appointments to gain control over contract decisions: Juan David Palacio Cardona, named director of the metropolitan area, and Álvaro Alonso Villada García, appointed subdirector of administration and finance. Their involvement, according to the probe, was to channel the contracts toward Misael Alberto Cadavid Jaramillo, the bomberos’ manager, in return for 15% kickbacks from the funds.
Read Also: Government plan to intervene in universities sparks concern
The operation reportedly functioned as follows: Quintero Calle instructed officials to award the contracts to Cadavid’s organization, then arranged for cash payments to be routed through intermediaries, including Sebastián de Dios Ortega Urán, accused of acting as a money courier, to reach Quintero Calle himself. The Attorney General’s Office also named Vanessa Álvarez Restrepo, the lawyer who drafted the contracts’ preliminary studies, as complicit in the irregularities.
