Armando Zamora, who resigned as head of Colombia's National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH) last week, has denied allegations of corruption made by the country's inspector general.
Zamora, who had been director of the oil-licencing agency since 2003, was accused of using agency money for scholarships of ANH officials and their children, as well as keeping back money owed to multinational investors. He denied the charges, accusing politicians in Congress of “distorting reality” and insisting that he was going to step down anyway to focus on his academic work.
The Inspector General, meanwhile, ordered the agency to reimburse US$551 million of royalties which it had collected since 2007 to beneficiaries.
Zamora's resignation highlights the ongoing battle which the government of President Juan Manuel Santos is waging against corruption, which is still a serious problem in Colombia's political circles. He is the latest in a string of high-profile figures to resign as a result of alleged graft, including the mayor of Bogota Samuel Moreno (suspended in May) and former agriculture minister Andres Felipe Arias (jailed in July pending trial).
The ANH under Zamora has presided over a dramatic improvement in Colombia's oil and gas sector, which has attracted billions of dollars of foreign investment in recent years. Successful government offensives against the guerrillas of the FARC have been a major factor; an increasingly open and transparent investment climate, which Zamora helped to engineer, has been another.
Zamora is insistent that he and the ANH always stayed within the law. His rapid resignation and the lack of a successor to replace him, however, seems to suggest that there was some merit to the inspector general's claims.
Sources: Reuters, Colombia Reports
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