Colombia. In the end he himself confirmed what last week was a rumor. Alfredo Sabbagh submitted his resignation to the Board of Directors of the National Television Authority, ANTV, after 10 months of management.
The news was announced in an interview published in the newspaper El Heraldo, from his hometown of Barranquilla. In it, he assures that his retirement from the ANTV was due to health problems that had been affecting him several days ago and the distance he had taken from his family due to the constant trips throughout the country.
But despite his explanations, his departure comes at a time when the ANTV faces a scandal over a constitutional demand on two decrees of the law that created it.
The first has to do with the autonomy of the ANTV budget, which must now be approved by the Ministry of Finance because the law says in an article that it is autonomous in budget but a paragraph later says otherwise. The problem arose when it became known that in the lawsuit they also seek to remove the ICT minister from the Board.
In this regard, Alfredo Sabbagh told El Heraldo that the Board hired the lawyer Germán Rodríguez, with the specific order to sue the two articles that have to do with the budget; but, without any request from the Board, counsel determined that, for the purposes of legal clarity, it was also important to demand the presence of the Minister of ICT on the Board because he considered that it went against the autonomy of the entity.
In this way, the Board of Directors of the ANTV will meet with three of the five members that by law it must have, because the representative of the government has not been appointed after the departure of Jaime Andrés Estrada at the end of last year.
