Bogotá, May 6, 2024
Since April 16, 2021, Drummond Ltd., through its lawyers, has filed before the Special Peace Jurisdiction (JEP) at least eight memorials, with more than a thousand pages of evidence that prove, above all, the inconsistencies in which Mr. Jaime Blanco Maya, now invited by the JEP to testify, has incurred in different statements made before the ordinary justice system and the JEP.
But more importantly, it has become clear that what Blanco Maya has referred to in relation to the alleged financing by Drummond Ltd. of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, through him and his company Industrial de Servicios y Alimentación Ltd. (ISA), is due to the story he fabricated for U.S. lawyers, led by Mr. Terry Collingsworth, who filed lawsuits against Drummond in the United States, and who made substantial payments in his favor.
Among the evidence of the payments that are now publicly available, there are e-mails between the team of plaintiff lawyers, which show the causal relationship between the story in which Blanco Maya incriminated Drummond Ltd. and the payments made as a result thereof.
Among other circumstances, they illustrate that the witness used attorney Ivan Otero as an intermediary to request a payment of $150,000 dollars as a condition to collaborate with his declaration (RICO Doc. 125-2), as well as that U.S. attorneys complied with such condition by arranging payments of at least $120,000 to Blanco Maya through attorney Otero (Doc. 477-4; Doc. 342-20; 644-18).
It should be noted that the circumstance of the payments made to the witness was assessed by the U.S. judicial authorities, who concluded that:
“The payments were made in connection with four actions in which Collingsworth and the Firm previously sued Drummond. It is undisputed that Collingsworth and the Firm clandestinely paid these witnesses hundreds of thousands of dollars.” (Free translation)
Assessing that:
“The evidence is undisputed that Blanco, El Tigre, Samario, and Charris are “factual” witnesses, all of whom received payments from the defendants’ litigation team in a timeline that appears “increasingly curious” upon closer examination. And all of these witnesses gave sworn testimony against Drummond”. (Free translation)
Moreover, the same judicial authorities in the United States highlighted the irregularity of the payments made, considering that:
“Collingsworth was caught in a lie. He made payments to witnesses and then lied about the number of payments, the nature of the payments, and the recipients of the payments. The evidence suggests that, despite clear warnings from lawyers about the convenience of such payments, Collingsworth used intermediaries in Colombia to make or facilitate payments to witnesses”. (Doc. 676) (Free translation)
It should also be emphasized that the situation described above was fully exposed to the JEP, so that it would be aware of Blanco Maya’s non-compliance with the truth commitments acquired with that authority in order to, instead, demonstrate that the “truth” that Blanco Maya began to present to the Colombian and U.S. authorities – just after being contacted by the U.S. lawyers who would later make payments on his behalf – does not correspond to reality, precisely because it is a lying and convenient account that has been made in exchange for payments and judicial benefits such as those he is receiving at the JEP (the authority that granted him his freedom).
Drummond calls on the JEP, in its mission to clarify the truth, which is a fundamental pillar of this jurisdiction, to study the decisions of the U.S. justice system and accept Drummond’s request to accept the evidence provided during the last three years.