Katherine Loaiza, entrepreneurship guru accused of scam

Katherine Loaiza has been listed as one of Colombia’s Most Outstanding Business Women in recent years, she is the only Latina on the Forbes Business Development Board.; but he will have to get back to his legal knowledge because of the legal issues that have been brought against his brands and cosmetics companies.

A few days ago, Loaiza said through a video posted on her social networks that she was facing legal proceedings for the failure of the Hot in Paraíso music festival in 2018. She said she decided to enter, as the lead investor, because the event had all the profile to be a success, but during development everything went wrong and ended with what she calls her second major bankruptcy.

As a result of this case, lawyer Fabio Humar wrote, according to the newspaper El Tiempo, “Katherine Loaiza’s job is to defraud people”. The eminent lawyer in corporate criminal law represents the businessman Luis Roberto Andrade, invited by Loaiza to participate as an investor in this concert.

The newspaper assures that Andrade was invited to invest $ 35,000 in Hot in Paraíso for which, according to Humar, they had told him that 14,000 of the 24,000 tickets they predicted as their goal had already been sold.

After the event failed, the legal team of the businessman, former president of the World Entrepreneurship Organization, received an alleged document from Loaiza in which he stated that only 6,990 tickets had been sold. .

In the video, the entrepreneur says the claim for the money sparked a brawl between the two. First, she signed a promissory note that Andrade sought to cash, then offered compensation through the production of antibacterial gels, which she manufactures, for a public tender that did not have location. However, he assures that a few weeks ago, he learned that Humar and Andrade, supposedly, had started a smear campaign against him.

This process is the subject of a criminal complaint, confirmed by El Tiempo, in which the businessman denounced “Massive and habitual collection of money, fraud aggravated by the amount, branding and corruption of food, medical products or prophylactic material” Loaiza and Pablo Andrés González Romero, her husband.

To these processes are added others, in which the cosmetic products of Loaiza are called into question. One of them by the company Grupo La Perla SAS, which would have acquired moisturizers and antibacterial gels, which after delivery did not correspond to the labeling and the product Essem Skincare would not be registered at Invima.

In a public statement on April 17, Loaiza accused Andrade and his lawyer Humar of alleged intimidation against him, in addition to violating his right to a good reputation, “even through the use of slander and defamation”., he pointed out.

“Mr. ANDRADE MANTILLA and his lawyer, Mr. HUMAR JARAMILLO declared that I had to accept their requests to recognize compensation for a business problem dating from 2018, which was publicly disclosed, threatening to end my reputation, my image, my career. a businesswoman, under the aggravation of doing everything through false information and discrediting through the media, taking advantage of the fact that my career, full of successes and failures as it happens in the business world ” Laoiza wrote in your press release.

According to her, a “peaceful resolution” of the conflict was not possible, although she assures that she was prepared to do so; But According to Humar told El Tiempo, the businesswoman “comes up with businesses that later, for no compelling reasons, turn out to be big failures” and that the money offered to repair the damage does not equal the damage.

Despite the pandemic, the businesswoman’s GoLab Cosmetics company billed more than $ 9 million in 2020 and forecasts 35% growth in 2021, as he told La República. In addition, this year, she will invest $ 2 million in five new labs and launch her personal brand of “Kathe Dice”.

This is what came to the conclusion of the 36-year-old businesswoman who, without having completed her law studies, had already founded a law firm serving her father’s clients.

Before ending her professional career, explains Semana magazine, Loaiza got the idea from her sister to import cosmetic creams from Israel, which could be welcomed in the country, and this is how GoLab Cosmetics was born.

Despite the success she claims to have had, what she calls came “His first bankruptcy” because the rise in the dollar price forced him to change his economic model, from an importer to a national producer of his cosmetic lines, with a laboratory in Bucaramanga.

Although he assures that he is still recovering after the failure of Hot in Paraíso, in his emporium he has 11 companies from different sectors such as GoDynamics, business consulting; We Boots SAS festival tools; As Bioduct of tools for restaurants.