LIMA, Peru (AFP) – Peru Former President Alejandro Toledo He was sentenced on Monday to 20 years and six months in prison in a case involving Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, which has become synonymous with corruption. Throughout Latin AmericaMillions of dollars were paid in bribes to government officials and others.
Authorities accused Toledo of accepting $35 million in bribes from Odebrecht in exchange for allowing the construction of a highway in the South American country. The Specialized National Supreme Court of Criminal Justice in the capital, Lima, issued the ruling after years of legal wrangling, including a dispute over whether Toledo, who ruled Peru from 2001 to 2006, was sentenced to life imprisonment. Can be delivered from the United States.
Judge Ines Rojas said Toledo’s victims were Peruvians who “trusted him” as their president. In this role, Toledo was “responsible for public finance management” and responsible for “protecting and ensuring the correct use” of resources, Rojas explained. Instead, she said, he “defrauded the state.”
She added that Toledo “had a duty to act with absolute impartiality, protect and preserve state assets, and avoid misusing or exploiting them,” but he did not do so.
Odebrecht, which has built some of Latin America’s most important infrastructure projects, admitted to US authorities in 2016 that it bought government contracts across the region with generous bribes. The investigation by the US Department of Justice included investigations in several countries, including Mexico, Guatemala and Ecuador.
In Peru, authorities accused Toledo and three other former presidents of receiving money from the construction giant. They claimed that Toledo received $35 million from Odebrecht for a contract to build a 650-kilometre (403-mile) highway linking Brazil to southern Peru. The cost of this section of the highway was initially estimated at $507 million, but Peru ended up paying $1.25 billion.
Rojas once read parts of the testimony of Jorge Barata, the former CEO of Odebrecht in Peru, who told prosecutors that the former president called him three times after leaving office to demand payment. Toledo lowered his gaze and looked at his hands as Rojas read the profanity-laced statements Barata had recounted to prosecutors.
Toledo denied the accusations against him. His lawyer, Roberto Siu, told reporters after the hearing that they would appeal the ruling.
The former president often smiled on Monday, and laughed at times, especially when the judge mentioned multimillion-dollar sums central to the case and also when she had difficulty reading transcripts and other evidence in the case. Throughout the hearing, he also invoked his right to speak with his lawyer.
On the other hand, last week he asked the court, with a broken voice and his hands together, as if he were praying, to allow him to return home because of his age, cancer and heart problems.
Toledo, 78, was first arrested in 2019 at his home in California, where he had lived since 2016, when he returned to Stanford University, his alma mater, as a visiting scholar to study education in Latin America. He was initially held in solitary confinement in the East San Francisco County Jail but was released and placed under house arrest in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and his deteriorating mental health.
It will be extradited to Peru in 2022 After the Court of Appeal rejected the appeal against his extradition, he surrendered himself to the authorities. He has since remained in pre-trial detention.
Rojas said Toledo will receive credit for time served starting in April 2023. He will serve the remainder of his sentence in a prison on the outskirts of Lima that was built specifically to house former Peruvian presidents.
Prosecutor José Domingo Pérez after the hearing called the ruling “historic” and said it showed Peruvians that “crimes and corruption are punished.”
Odebrecht was rebranded as Novonor in 2020.
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Garcia Cano reported from Mexico City.
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