2023-04-23 20:35:00
Former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo arrived in Lima this Sunday after being extradited from the United States to be prosecuted for corruption and money laundering in the framework of the mega-scandal of bribes paid by the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht. The former official had turned himself in to the US authorities last Friday to be returned to his country.
Toledo, 77, arrived in the Peruvian capital on a commercial flight from Los Angeles and in the custody of Interpol agents. According to images released by the media, the former president was received at the Jorge Chávez international airport by prosecutors and police. Toledo’s defense anticipated that will request that the prison be homebut the Prosecutor’s Office announced that it will not accept it.
Former Peruvian President Toledo turned himself in in the US and will be extradited to his country
Toledo is accused of having received 35 million dollars in bribes from Odebrecht in exchange for tenders for public works on the South Interoceanic highway. For this reason, the prosecutor in the case, José Domingo Pérez, requested twenty years and six months in prison. The former strongman of Peru, who ruled from 2001 to 2006, turned himself in at the request of a judge Friday morning in a federal court in San Jose, California, for the final phase of the extradition process.
For six years he managed to delay the extradition process that Peru had been seeking since 2018, but he was defeated in all appeals and the United States authorized his deportation in February. “I only ask that they don’t put me in jail”he affirmed after assuring that he suffers from serious health complications, including an alleged cancer.
Once in the hands of the Peruvian authorities, Toledo will undergo a legal medical examination and judicial control by a judge and will be transferred to the Barbadillo prison, inside the headquarters of the Directorate of Special Police Operations (Diroes), where he must serve 18 months in pretrial detention pending the start of the trial against him. There are only two other inmates in the establishment: former presidents Alberto Fujimori, who has been serving 25 years in prison since 2007 for the Barrios Altos (1991) and La Cantuta (1992) massacres, where 25 people were murdered, and Pedro Castillo, who is waiting a process for alleged sedition after his attempt to close Congress for which he was dismissed last December.
The former Peruvian president He was arrested in 2019 in the United States, where he lived after having worked at Stanford University. Although he was initially jailed, a year later he was released on bail and has lived in the state of California ever since.
The former president has denied the accusations against him., alleging that it is a political plot against him, and stated that “I never received a ill-gotten penny”. Suspicions of corruption began in 2016, when he failed to explain the origin of more than four million dollars in the accounts of Ecoteva, one of his organizations. Added to this, in 2017, in the context of the confessions of the Brazilian construction company, the former representative of Odebrecht in Peru, Jorge Barata, reported the payment of a bribe for 20 million dollars, but whose alleged amount grew in subsequent testimonies.
Toledo He is the third Peruvian president to go to prison for various crimes. “We have this sad record of three ex-presidents in prison,” he told Archyde.com criminal lawyer Carlos Caro. “There is no precedent in the region or anywhere else in the world,” he added.
Silvana Carrión, a prosecutor investigating corruption cases linked to Odebrecht, recently said that they are still waiting for a judge to determine when the trial against Toledo will begin and has described the case as “a great achievement of the justice system of Peru”.
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