Bogota, Feb 17 (EFE).- Colombia's defense minister on Monday acknowledged "administrative deficiencies" in 10 army procurement contracts and announced the forced retirement of an officer at the center of a scandal involving the collection of kickbacks of up to 50 percent of the value of the transactions.
Juan Carlos Pinzon spoke out a day after newsweekly Semana's publication of an expose based on hundreds of hours of recorded conversations.
The tapes, held by a congressional investigative committee, indicate that officers rigged the bidding for contracts to provide the army aviation service with equipment, fuel and other supplies.
Pinzon said Monday that the army's inspector-general, Gen. Ernesto Maldonado, randomly selected 105 contracts for close examination and detected irregularities in 10 of them.
From now on, the minister said, all army aviation procurement will be handled by the Defense Ministry and outside auditors will be brought in "to verify the quality of the processes."
One of the tapes cited by Semana features an unknown individual in conversation with Lt. Col. Robinson Gonzalez del Rio about successful efforts to have a contract for the army Aerial Assault division worth 14 million pesos ($7 million) awarded to the preferred bidder.
The former head of that division and current military head of joint operations, Gen. Javier Rey Navas, announced his retirement Monday.
Gonzalez del Rio continued to coordinate the bid-rigging scheme despite his being in an army stockade for the extrajudicial execution of two people in 2007.
The colonel will be cashiered and transferred to another detention center, Pinzon said.
The officers who were in charge of the army stockades during the period of the incriminating recordings of Gonzalez del Rio are also to be forced into retirement, the minister said.
A high-level Defense Ministry panel he assembled on Sunday to review the allegations in the Semana article has already reported its initial conclusions, Pinzon said.
Ten of the 19 audios mentioned by Semana "make reference to alleged influence-peddling in matters related to contracting and of those 10, in only three can it be inferred ... that there is a correspondence with an existing contract," he said.
