Colombian prosecutors said on Tuesday they suspect President Juan Manuel Santos, winner of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize, received a bribe from scandal-plagued Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht for his 2014 re-election campaign.

Colombian Attorney General Nestor Humberto Martínez announced that $1 million USD of bribe money that his office claims Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht paid to former Congress member Otto Nicolás Bula may have ended up under the management of the 2014 re-election campaign of President Juan Manuel Santos.

The shocking announcement came amid a sweeping international scandal in which Bula was detained last month for allegedly taking $4.6 million USD worth of bribes for his role in ensuring that Odebrecht won a lucrative contract for work on the country’s Ruta Ocaña-Gamarra highway. Some of those illicit funds were funneled to Panamanian and Chinese companies, said Martínez today, and it appears that the Santos campaign may have also been on the receiving end.

Roberto Prieto, manager of the 2014 Santos campaign, is expected to be the next in line to answer to the attorney general’s office and the National Election Council, which will conduct a further investigation. In a statement, Prieto denied the claims, saying that “never, but never, have I even shared a coffee” with Bula.

The Santos administration was even more forceful in denouncing the allegation, categorizing it as another attempt by the political opposition to implicate the president in a scandal. “History repeats itself,” said Camilo Enciso Vanegas, secretary of transparency for the Santos administration, claiming an ongoing strategy of the opposition to “defend itself by attacking with lies.”

Enciso detailed two other incidents he believes represent similar cases, adding that the campaign received no donations, was fully funded by legal means, and that Prieto should be trusted over those alleging that the campaign took $1 million USD of illicit funds.

“According to the attorney general, there is no evidence that the money has actually been paid to the manager of the Santos presidential campaign,” said Enciso. “It is the word of a delinquent … against the word of the campaign manager.”

The attorney general did not reveal the extent of the evidence. Martínez did say, however, that his office initiated a formal investigation into the 2014 election financing at the request of the rival Democratic Center political party. The party’s specific concern was regarding recent claims in the Brazilian media that a local advisor to Óscar Iván Zuluaga, who Santos of the Party of the U beat in the 2014 race, had received funds from Odebrecht.

What this could mean for Santos remains unclear. But particularly given the hostile, partisan climate in Colombia after a liberal Congress passed an unpopular peace accord and tax reform late last year, the fallout could be significant. Just last month, Santos said that fighting the “cancer” of corruption in Colombia would be his administration’s number-one priority for 2017, and now he finds his name attached to a potential scandal.

After the announcement, local television cameras and reporters caught up with Santos’ chief political rival — right-wing Democratic Center party head, current senator, and former President Álvaro Uribe — to hear his view on the news. “It is a serious moment,” said Uribe. He added only that he didn’t want to offer a public assessment until he had time to properly review the situation.

Santos, who served in Uribe’s cabinet as the minister of defense before falling out with his former boss, first won the presidency in 2010. He won re-election in 2014 in a two-candidate runoff with the Uribe-endorsed Zuluaga, sealing his return to the presidential palace Casa Nariño with a 51% to 45% margin in the vote.

(finance colombia)

Several items belonging to social activist Kailash Satyarthi were stolen as the Nobel laureate’s home in Greater Kailash’s Aravali Apartments was broken into, DCP South East Delhi , India confirmed.

According to Media, the Nobel citation was allegedly stolen from the house in India. The child rights activist, who won the peace prize in 2014, had shared it with Malala Yousafzai from Pakistan.

In 2004, Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel Prize for literature, which he won in 1913, was also stolen.

Arthur Henderson:
The Nobel Peace Prize medal won by Arthur Henderson, one of the founding fathers of Britain’s Labour Party, had been stolen in a £150,000 raid at the Lord Mayor’s office in Newcastle in April 2013. Henderson, a key figure in the modern Labour Party, was its first-ever cabinet minister and had won his prize for his ultimately unsuccessful work on international disarmament before World War II. In spite of an arrest, the medal has not been recovered till date.

Yasser Arafat:
Former chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Authority, Yasser Arafat, had shared the 1994 Nobel Peace prize with then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres for their work in reaching the 1993 Oslo interim peace accord. After his death in 2004, the medallion had been kept in his Gaza headquarters. When the PLO rival Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007 from forces loyal to Arafat’s successor, President Mahmoud Abbas, the building was looted and the medal stolen. It has since been returned and will be restored in a museum dedicated to the Palestinian leader where it will be preserved along with his other belongings.

Ernest O. Lawrence:
The first-ever Nobel medallion won by the University of California, Berkeley was stolen in February 2007. The 1939 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Professor Ernest O. Lawrence for the invention of the cyclotron, an accelerator of sub-atomic particles that led to the nuclear age. Lawrence died in 1958 and the Lawrence Hall of Science within the university, where the medal was on display and stolen from, was named in his honor. A few days after the theft, the medal was recovered and the thief, who turned out to be working in the premises, turned out to be a 22-year old university student, Ian Sanchez.

Rabindranath Tagore:
Celebrated poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore’s 1913 Nobel Prize medal for literature was stolen from Visva Bharati University’s museum in Shantiniketan in March 2004, along with his certificate and some personal possessions. The theft case, which was opened, closed (due to lack of progress), opened again and closed again by the CBI, saw some progress in November 2016 when Pradip Bauri was arrested by the special investigation team (SIT) in connection with it for providing a safe passage to the culprits to move the stolen items from Shanti Niketan to elsewhere.

While Nobel Prize gold medals tend to sell for tens of thousands of dollars (if not millions) when they are auctioned, stolen medals are usually only worth their value in gold to the thieves and are likely dissolved quickly. Before 1980, the Nobel Prize medal used to be made from 23 carat gold. They are now made with 18 carat green gold, plated with 24 carat gold.