The Consejo de Estado struck down six articles of Decreto 2669 de 2012 on 4 June 2026, but left the rest of the factoring decree in force, keeping the basic machinery of this finance regime intact for commercial companies that sell unpaid invoices at a discount.
Who Holds the Levers
The court, sitting as its Sección Primera, said the government exceeded its regulatory power under Ley 1231 de 2008. That’s the core of the ruling. The Executive went beyond what the law allowed when it issued a comprehensive regulation of factoring as an economic activity, and the judges annulled articles 2, 3, 4, 5, 12 and 13. Those provisions covered definitions, insurance against non-payment, discount rates for past-due instruments, assignment clauses, funding limits and prohibited operations.
Factoring itself is a short-term finance arrangement in which a supplier sells unpaid invoices to a third party at a discount. In Colombia, it’s also called compra de cartera, literally the purchase of a receivables book. The decree applied only to factoring companies set up as ordinary commercial companies, not supervised by the financial or solidarity regulators. The Superintendencia de Sociedades oversees these companies and maintains a register of factors. That’s the apparatus in charge of keeping the system moving.
What Survives the Cut
The court kept articles 1, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 14. That means the framework still stands, including article 8, which created the Registro Único Nacional de Factores, and article 9, which imposes anti-money-laundering duties on factors. The ruling also leaves article 6 on assignments and article 10 on corporate governance untouched. Article 7 had already been repealed in 2014 and wasn’t part of the case.
Decreto 2669 de 2012 was issued on 21 December 2012 by the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism and took effect on 21 June 2013. Its stated purpose was to ease invoice circulation and help factoring grow for SMEs. Thirteen years later, the court has trimmed back part of the decree, but the broader structure remains standing. The state can slice off a few overreaching clauses and still preserve the framework that channels small suppliers into a regulated finance system.
What the Plaintiff Said
The plaintiff argued that Ley 1231 de 2008 only sought to unify the invoice and give anti-money-laundering tools, and did not delegate power to set the substantive regime for factoring. The court didn’t bother with the other grounds raised in the suit. It said the excess of regulatory power was proven, and that was enough.
The six annulled articles had also been incorporated into Colombia’s consolidated commerce regulation, Decreto Único Reglamentario 1074 de 2015, and are now flagged as void in the official Normograma compilation. So the legal cleanup reaches beyond one decree and into the broader regulatory stack that keeps commercial finance organized from above.
The ruling means factoring by these commercial companies falls back on Ley 1231 de 2008 and ordinary commercial law. The court removed six pieces, but the core framework stays in place, with the register, the anti-money-laundering duties, and the corporate rules still intact. The bosses of the system lose a few lines on paper. The structure keeps breathing.