‘The dancer.’ That was the name by which, according to senior Ecopetrol officials, the first lady, Verónica Alcocer, was known, to whom a great power within the state oil company has been attributed since the beginning of the Petro government.
For months, EL TIEMPO revealed that Alcocer had influence in at least one of the company’s powerful subsidiaries; and the Catalan Manel Grau, her friend, was moving pieces to place people in the Ecopetrol Group. This latest version was confirmed with an audio in which Grau is heard requesting resumes for crude manager in Bogotá and head of the Ecopetrol office in Singapore.
Rojas, Grau and Ferrer
On July 10, Ecopetrol officially denied to EL TIEMPO any link of the Catalan with the appointment of those positions and assured that people with career and technical expertise arrived at these posts.
But EL TIEMPO’s Investigative Unit has new evidence that would confirm the interference of Alcocer and Grau in the powerful Hocol. Also, emails received by Ricardo Roa (the resigned president of Ecopetrol) from Eva Ferrer, the other Catalan friend of the ex-wife of President Gustavo Petro and former official of his Government.
The former president of Hocol, Luis Enrique Rojas, told EL TIEMPO exclusively that Grau contacted him through a third person (whose identity is withheld) to offer him the support of the first lady so that he would not be removed from office.
‘To the water, ducks’
At that time, March 2025, a fight had broken out between Rojas and Roa, which included allegations of surveillance and shady contracts.
“After the call, Grau summoned me to the apartment that Ricardo Roa has rented on 105th Street, near a place called ‘Al agua patos’, and told me that the first lady would support me staying in exchange for me moving one or two resumes in Hocol. I replied that as long as they applied and met the requirements”, Rojas told EL TIEMPO’s Investigative Unit and confirmed this to the Prosecutor’s Office.
His version is key because Rojas is the star witness of the prosecuting entity and a victim in the process against Roa for influence peddling, a case that started from an investigation by EL TIEMPO’s Investigative Unit about the purchase of his luxurious apartment 901 and the intermediation of former police officer Juan Guillermo Mancera.
In this chapter, they request an investigation into a million-dollar food supply contract, which this newspaper had already reported on.
Eva’s emails to Roa
Among senior executives of the oil company, emails sent by Eva Ferrer, the former right hand of the first lady, in 2025 have also started to circulate, where she was requesting funding for a country project. These gained relevance after the leak, this past weekend, of audios of Ferrer talking about alleged businesses, front men, and Verónica Alcocer’s influence in Ecopetrol.
One of the messages in EL TIEMPO’s possession is dated April 25, 2025, and in it she sends information from her personal email about ‘Colombia, beyond memory’, a kind of thank you from the country to the world, for the human, political, and economic support for peace, within the framework of the 80th anniversary of the UN. At that time, there was talk of sponsorship of a little more than 2 billion pesos from the oil company’s fund.
EL TIEMPO contacted Ferrer who began by clarifying that this initial message was in a personal capacity and that neither the Petro government nor the First Lady was involved.
“I presented it (the project) to the President, because I have been moving this in different ways, and I told him I don’t need resources, I need political support. I wrote to Laura Sarabia; I wrote to the Minister of Political Support, no one answered, and at one point the United Nations called me and said: ‘It’s now or never.’ So I met with Angie Rodríguez, and I told her: I’m in this, I’m looking for a team, because I don’t know who will work with me, and I think this will be much easier to give a Government sense“, Ferrer explained to EL TIEMPO’s Investigative Unit.
And she added: “Then, I rejoined the government as an advisor to the Administrative Department of the Presidency (Dapre), and resumed the proposal from a much larger institutional point of view. At that time I sent some emails to Ricardo Roa about the matter“, said the Spaniard, after assuring that she resigned from that position last July 20.
‘I will not talk about the audios’
Indeed, in an email dated August 15, 2025, in which Ferrer already signs as “advisor, office of the Director of the Department / General Secretariat of Dapre,” she tells Roa that: “As the largest company in the country and an active actor in the peace and reconciliation process, we dare to request your contribution to this initiative which will consist of a book and an exhibition that features 160 images of a unique sensitivity of the conflict and the peace process, captured over more than 37 years by the artist Mauricio Vélez“.
(Consult here all the articles from EL TIEMPO’s Investigative Unit)
In the audios revealed by Semana magazine, Ferrer is heard mentioning: “Eva has had to endure Mauricio’s anger at home, him complaining about the books, because the lady (Verónica Alcocer) had committed to 30,000 books’. What Eva has had to swallow…”.
And in another part, she is heard saying: “He (Ricardo Roa) has made mistakes, the same as (Álvaro) Leyva. They are people who didn’t know how to say no (…) I told (Xavier) Vendrell the other day: ‘How can you do that to a friend? A friend? A friend doesn’t put you as a front man’, okay? Everything they have done with Roa”.
But when this newspaper insisted on the alleged businesses of Verónica Alcocer in Ecopetrol, she responded: “I can’t talk to you about the audios. I am forbidden. They recorded me illegally and have leaked it illegally without informing me. It was without my consent, distributed without consent. It was illegal, improper, unauthorized and without my knowledge, violating the right to privacy, family privacy, and the inviolability of communications”.
Verónica Alcocer also denied any irregular conduct.
INVESTIGATIVE UNIT
u.investigativa@eltiempo.com
@UinvestigativaET
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