Former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo was sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison for paying Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht millions of dollars in bribes to government officials and others in a case that has become synonymous with corruption across Latin America. Sentenced to months.
Authorities accused Toledo of accepting $35 million in bribes from Odebrecht in exchange for permission to build a highway in the South American country.
The ruling by the National Superior Court of Criminal Justice in the capital Lima came after years of legal wrangling, including a dispute over whether Toledo, who ruled Peru from 2001 to 2006, can be extradited from the United States.
Judge Ines Rojas said Toledo's victims were Peruvians who “trusted” him as president. In that role, Rojas explained that Toledo is “in charge of financial management” and is responsible for “protecting and ensuring the proper use” of resources. Rather, she said, he “deceived the nation.”
He added that Toledo “has an obligation to act with absolute neutrality, to protect and preserve national assets, and to avoid their abuse and exploitation,” but he failed to do so.
Odebrecht, who has built some of Latin America's most important infrastructure projects, admitted to U.S. authorities in 2016 that he bought government contracts across the region with generous bribes.
The U.S. Department of Justice investigation has opened investigations in several countries, including Mexico, Guatemala and Ecuador.
In Peru, authorities have accused Toledo and three other former presidents of receiving payments from a construction giant.
They claimed that Toledo received $35 million from Odebrecht in exchange for a contract to build a 403-mile highway connecting Brazil and southern Peru.
The cost of that section of the highway was originally estimated at $507 million, but Peru ended up paying $1.25 billion.
At one point, Rojas read part of the testimony of former Peruvian Odebrecht executive Jorge Barata, who said the former president called him up to three times after leaving office to demand compensation, prosecutors said. told.
Toledo lowered his gaze and looked at his hands as Rojas read out the expletive-laden statements Barata had told prosecutors.
Mr. Toledo denies the accusations against him. His lawyer, Roberto Siu, told reporters after the hearing that he intended to appeal the verdict.
The former president frequently grinned and sometimes laughed Monday, especially when the judge mentioned the multimillion-dollar sum at the center of the case and when he struggled to read court records and other evidence.
Throughout the hearing, he also emphasized his right to speak to an attorney.
By contrast, last week he asked the court to allow him to return home, with his voice hoarse and his hands clasped together in prayer, citing 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 his alma mater, Stanford University, as a visiting scholar studying 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 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and worsening mental health.
He was extradited to Peru in 2022 after an appeals court rejected his objections to extradition and he surrendered to authorities. He has remained in preventive detention ever since.
Rojas said Toledo will receive time credits beginning in April 2023.
He will serve the remainder of his sentence in a prison outside Lima built specifically to house the former Peruvian president.
Prosecutor José Domingo Pérez said after the hearing that the verdict was “historic” and showed Peruvians that “crime and corruption will be punished.”
Odebrecht was rebranded to Novonol in 2020.
