Police in Colombia’s second largest city Medellin arrested an attorney with a list of more than 1,000 real estate properties supposedly controlled by the agency that manages drug traffickers’ confiscated assets.

In a press release, the Special Assets Society (SAE) said that they found that the attorney, Enrique Leon Machado, occupied a luxury home that used to be registered to a front man of paramilitary organization EGC.

In the same building, police found “lists of real estate registration numbers, as well as records with the names of the entity’s employees, and their respective positions and roles.”

This information is supposed to be classified, said the SAE, which asked the prosecution to investigate how the papers ended up with an alleged squatter.

SAE director Amelia Perez stressed that her agency’s mission is to “guarantee that the assets that in the past were at the service of illegal economies today are converted into opportunities for the communities and the development of the country.”

In a response, President Gustavo Petro said that the arrested suspect was “the trusted lawyer of former Senator and former Senate president Juan Diego Gomez,” a controversial member of the Conservative Party.

Petro accused Gomez of being involved in a “parallel SAE” that allowed the administration of former President Ivan Duque to use confiscated assets as bargaining chips for political support among political and business elites.

“The same thing happened with hacker Carlos Escobar. They are front men for politicians with large amounts of SAE assets who acted as intermediaries with other politicians and drug traffickers,” said Petro.

Gomez left Congress in 2022 amid growing evidence suggesting the politician controlled real estate in and around Medellin with notorious former cartel associates.

The former Senate president claimed on social media platform X that “I have never seen” Machado. “He is not my attorney.”

Gomez accused Petro of using “gossip” to persecute political adversaries.