Roberto Prieto, former Santos presidential campaign manager, is serving his sentence in the Odebrecht case

José Roberto Prieto Uribe, the former manager of Juan Manuel Santos's presidential campaign in 2010 and 2014, was released on April 17. The prisoner was sentenced to five years in prison in 2019 for the Odebrecht case after reaching a pre-agreement with the Attorney General's Office when accepting the charges.

On April 13, the Tenth Court for the Execution of Penalties and Security Measures, which was in charge of Prieto's case, sent the release ballot to the Police Graduate School, where he was being held. The document warned that the president would leave “from 17 April” because he achieved the reductions in sentence due to his work and good behavior in the prison.

It should be recalled that the former manager of Santos was prosecuted for the crimes of falsehood in a private document as a determiner and trafficking in private influence and undue interest in the conclusion of contracts. With the pre-agreement, he was allowed to spend his sentence in a military garrison, instead of the La Modelo prison.

Despite the fact that Prieto served his sentence, the Prosecutor's Office assured on February 22, 2021 that it would charge him with irregularities in the contracting of the Ruta del Sol III. In this way, the former manager would face another judicial process for the crime of money laundering, which had not been taken into account in his conviction.

The announcement came after an elite body of the Public Prosecutor's Office obtained evidence that would show that Roberto Prieto intervened in obtaining the contract for a bridge on the Ruta del Sol III and would have kept 10%. Investigations reveal that Prieto received cash and bank transactions from the subcontract money that was never executed.

The Prosecutor's Office will also try to link Luis Fernando Andrade, former director of the National Infrastructure Agency (ANI), in this case for alleged corruption. The former official is already on trial for Ruta del Sol II.

Prieto's conviction in the Odebrecht case

Prieto was singled out to try to move influences in the ANI to carry out works for the benefit of third parties. In addition, he was called to disciplinary proceedings for failing to report income from Odebrecht towards the campaign of the now former president. The prisoner did not include any in-kind income received for the presidential first-round campaign.

According to the Office of the Attorney General, Odebrecht's revenue would have been used for opinion polls and electoral studies contracted with Paddington Ventures Limited. These studies cost one million dollars and were carried out by Sancho BBDO, the firm responsible for the advertising activity of 'Santos Presidente 2014'.

According to the investigation by the Public Prosecutor's Office, it was decided to directly allocate the money to the firm responsible for conducting the survey work in order to distract attention from the multimillion-dollar donation of the Foreign Construction Company Norberto Odebrecht S.A. The institution also argued that the studies, of course, carried material that appealed to presidential re-election and the products had “direct recommendations to improve communication and publicity strategies for the campaign”.

It was also indicated that the reason why this investigation falls to Prieto is because in his capacity as legal representative of the Juan Manuel Santos campaign and manager of it for the 2014-2018 period, he “held the capacity of private administrator of public resources”.

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