HomeFeaturesCorruption: Peru's Ex-President Toledo Sentenced Over 20 Years

Corruption: Peru’s Ex-President Toledo Sentenced Over 20 Years

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A Peruvian court on Monday sentenced former president Alejandro Toledo to more than 20 years in prison after he was convicted of accepting bribes from Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.

The Superior Court accepted the prison term recommended by the prosecution, it announced at a hearing attended by the 78-year-old, who led the South American nation from 2001 to 2006.

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Toledo, who says he has cancer and heart problems, appeared calm as he was found guilty of collusion and money laundering for having received $35 million from Odebrecht.

The court found that he had accepted bribes in exchange for tenders to build two sections of an international highway linking the Pacific coast of Peru and the Atlantic coast of Brazil.

Toledo was extradited last year from the United States, where he had been living for several years before surrendering at a federal court building in California.

Odebrecht, which has since changed its name to Novonor, has admitted to paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes throughout Latin America to secure huge public works contracts.

Toledo is one of several Peruvian presidents implicated in a massive investigation targeting the group, which acknowledged paying millions in bribes to Peruvian officials between 2005 and 2014.

Two-term leader Alan Garcia committed suicide in 2019 when police came to his house to arrest him.

In 2018, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski became the first Latin American president to resign over alleged connections to the Odebrecht scandal.

Toledo has denied the accusations against him. His attorney, Roberto Siu, told reporters after the hearing that they will appeal the sentence.

The former president on Monday frequently smirked, and at times laughed, particularly when the judge mentioned multimillion-dollar sums central to the case as well as when she struggled to read transcripts and other evidence in the case. Throughout the hearing, he also leaned to his right to speak with his attorney.

In contrast, last week, he asked the court with a broken voice and his hands together, as if he were praying, to let him return home citing his age, cancer and heart problems.

Toledo, 78, was first arrested in 2019 at his home in California, where he had been living 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 at a county jail east of San Francisco but was released to house arrest in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and his deteriorating mental health.

He was extradited to Peru in 2022 after a court of appeals denied a challenge to his extradition and he surrendered to authorities. He has since remained under preventive detention.

Rojas said Toledo will get credit for time served starting in April 2023. He will serve the remainder of his sentence at a prison on the outskirts of Lima that was built specifically to house former Peruvian presidents.

Prosecutor Jose Domingo Perez after the hearing described the sentence as “historic” and said it shows Peruvians that “crimes and corruption are punished.”

 

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