Attorney General's Office requested the Constitutional Court declared enforceable transitional regime for resources from the General System of Royalties

The Attorney General's Office, Alejandro Ordóñez Maldonado asked the Constitutional Court to declare enforceable Article 156 of Decree 4923 of 2011, which guarantees the operation of the General System of Royalties, on the understanding that resources for the nation that this article refers are intended to prioritize the recovery of the affected country's road network as a result of the emergency winter, because that is the established distribution on Legislative Act 05 of 2011.

The rule establishes a defendant transitional regime for resources for the marketing margin of hydrocarbon royalties available to December 31, 2011, under the heading of errands to third parties of the National Hydrocarbons Agency, of which 50% must be allocated the nation, 10% to the tertiary road network and 5% to Standardization Program Electrical Networks.

According to the lawsuit, this provision violates the principle of decentralization because it omits the criterion of distribution of royalties, as none of the recipients referred to the appropriate territorial level.

In rendering concept, the chief prosecutors explained that the marketing margin in relation to the category of collections for third parties which reposes in the National Hydrocarbons Agency "refers to the difference that it was the turn of royalties from oil to local authorities and the National Endowment Fund, according to the initial price or liquidated causation to the Ministry of Mines and Energy, compared to the final price was obtained for the marketing of these was the National Hydrocarbons Agency from its collection in kind, as regulated in that respect paragraph 24 of Article 12 of Decree 70 of 2001 and section 10 of Decree 1760 of 2003. "

Under this, noted that if one considers that the marketing margin came directly from the royalties and these had a constitutional earmarked for local authorities, we conclude that the money from the marketing margin are resources that are part of such royalties, as at the time the Attorney General's Office, through the National Delegate for Preventive Monitoring of Public Service, it advised the Government in letter filed on December 3, 2010 in the National Hydrocarbons Agency.

But they also said that it should be noted that existing resources to December 31, 2011 by way of margin trading of hydrocarbon royalties have the nature of not committed for the purpose of distribution to regional as coming from exchange risks and international market oil prices, which is why they have made a distribution thereof, in the standard defendant "responded to the need to adjust those resources to the new constitutional regulations on royalties, especially in light of referred to in paragraph 1, Transitional Legislative Act 05 of 2011, so it is not committed to the principle of legality or rights acquired by local authorities, and resources they were generated in previous lifetimes to the issuance of the challenged regulation. "