The former President of Peru, Alejandro Toledo, was sentenced on Monday to 20 years and six months in prison in a corruption case.
Toledo received £35 million in bribes from Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht in exchange for allowing the construction of a 403 mile highway linking Brazil with southern Peru.
The case saw years of legal wrangling including a dispute over the extradition of the former president from the United States.
Toledo, 78, governed Peru between 2001 and 2006, and was first arrested in 2019 at his home in California, where he had been living since 2016.
Peruvian former President Alejandro Toledo attends a court session where the judge will rule in his corruption case in Lima, Peru, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. Toledo was sentenced to twenty years and six months on Monday.
Guadalupe Pardo/AP
He was 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 appeal denied a challenge to his extradition and he surrendered to authorities.
He has since remained under preventive detention.
The sentencing took place at National Superior Court of Specialized Criminal Justice in the capital, Lima.
Judge Inés 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.
Rojas said Toledo’s victims were ordinary Peruvians who “trusted” him as their president.
Rojas said that as president Toledo was “in charge of managing public finances” and responsible for “protecting and ensuring the correct” use of resources.
Instead he “defrauded the state.”
Toledo “had the duty to act with absolute neutrality, protect and preserve the assets of the state, avoiding their abuse or exploitation,” but he did not do so.
Odebrecht became synonymous with corruption across Latin America after it paid millions of dollars in bribes to government officials and others.
Odebrecht admitted to U.S. authorities in 2016 to having bought government contracts in Latin America through bribes.
An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice covered several countries, including Mexico, Guatemala and Ecuador.
Authorities in Peru accused Toledo and three other former presidents of receiving payments from Odebrecht.
The highway built by Odebrecht was meant to cost $507 million, but Peru ended up paying $1.25 billion.
Newsweek has reached out to Odebrecht, now known as Novonor for comment via email.
Rojas read parts of the testimony from Jorge Barata, a former Odebrecht executive in Peru, who told prosecutors that the former president called him up to three times after leaving office to demand that he be paid.
Toledo denied the accusations against him.
Roberto Siu, Toledo’s attorney, told reporters after the hearing that they will appeal the sentence.
Toledo frequently smirked and occasionally laughed during the case on Monday, and spoke with his attorney throughout the hearing. This was in contrast to his tone last week when he asked the court with a broken voice to let him return home citing his age, cancer and heart problems.
Prosecutor José Domingo Pérez described the sentence as “historic” and said it shows Peruvians that “crimes and corruption are punished.”
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press
