The former director of Colombia’s once biggest health care provider is about to become an alleged criminal with an international arrest warrant against him, the country’s public prosecution office said Thursday.
Former CEO Victor Maldonado has been wanted by a Colombian court on charges he and his fellow directors had embezzled more than $700 million from healthcare intermediary SaludCoop.
The board of director’s excessive spending behavior nearly bankrupted SaludCoop in 2011. In order to prevent millions of Colombians to suddenly be left without health care, the government then took over the company.
Maldonado already had an international location order warranted against him.
Going underground for real
Interpol agreed to convert this so-called blue notice to a red notice, a sort of international arrest warrant, after the suspect failed to appear at a court hearing over the mass embezzlement.
The former CEO had asked to do the hearing over Skype from an undisclosed location. The court turned the request down.
The now fugitive Maldonado is one of the masterminds of one of Colombia’s most damaging corruption scandals in recent history.
Under his leadership, the company embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars that for example ended up in Panamanian golf courses.
How does this affect Colombians?
SaludCoop is what in Colombia is called an EPS. Privately owned EPS’s are the compulsory intermediaries between funds coming from clients and hospitals and receive billions of dollars every year to pay for the medical care of Colombians citizens.
However, a number of these companies got into mayor credit trouble over corruption absurd investment schemes and general mismanagement.
Controversially, EPS’s like SaludCoop began running their own hospitals, competing with the hospitals they were supposed to fund.
The chaos and corruption within these EPS’s has put the Colombian health system on the border of collapse.
Hundreds of hospitals have been facing bankruptcy because payments from EPS’s come late if coming in at all.
Meanwhile, millions of Colombians who must be assigned to one of these intermediaries receive substandard health care.
Thousands of lawsuits have been filed by patients demanding treatment while authorities have claimed that more than $5 billion was embezzled by EPS’s.
The plot thickens
Eduardo Montealegre
However, both the prosecution of allegedly criminal health magnates and the reform of the failing health care system has been complicated by close ties between the EPS’s and those in Colombian politics and justice.
Colombia’s largest healthcare company embezzled 300M after govt takeover: Senator
The country’s prosecutor general, Eduardo Montealegre, paradoxically was the legal adviser of SaludCoop while the health company was carrying out its illegal activities.
It is the prosecutor general’s office that is now investigating the crimes allegedly committed by Maldonado when Montealegre was his legal adviser.
When the company was put under government control, Montealegre was hired by the Santos administration on a contract basis and elected by Congress to become Prosecutor General in 2012.
To not unjustly leave out the third and last branch of power, congress has benefited from the EPS’s excessive spending behavior through major campaign donations.
‘Embezzled health money ended up in political parties’ hands’
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