RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Peruvian government approved this Wednesday to request for the second time the extradition of former president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) and his wife Eliane Karp for the Ecoteva case of money laundering, a request that will be sent to the United States in the coming weeks.
The Minister of Justice, Eduardo Vega, explained that the Council of Ministers today approved the extradition request to the United States for the Ecoteva case, an investigation into an “offshore” company formed by the mother-in-law of the former president in Costa Rica and with whose funds he acquired properties in Peru.
“This Government, complying with the corresponding procedure, enabled and carried out the whole extradition process, and today in the Council of Ministers, these two extradition requests were approved,” declared Vega in a press conference.
The requests will be sent to the country’s Attorney General’s Office “to continue the corresponding process and be sent to the United States,” added the minister.
The Minister reminded that the Ecoteva case responds to an accusation of money laundering and stems from an investigation by the Judicial Power.
The investigations found “a money route with ‘offshore’ accounts in Panama and Costa Rica,” which then “came to Peru to make real estate purchases and (that is why) in March 2020 it was decided to make the extradition request.”
Peru first requested the extradition of Toledo for alleged bribes received from the Brazilian company Odebrecht for about US$35 million, and is waiting for the US Department of Justice to resolve the process.
Vega indicated that the request would be officially published this Thursday, after being sent to the Prosecutor’s Office, where a translation of the file will be made. Then it will be sent to the United States, a process that will take approximately one month.
Toledo’s extradition trial has been postponed several times at the request of his defense counsel, which has asked for more time to review and translate the documents sent by Peru.
It is currently set to begin on September 23.
The former president was arrested in July 2019 in California, where he has resided in recent years, and spent eight months in prison for flight risk. He was finally able to get out of jail and move to house arrest in March 2020, with the outbreak of the pandemic.
However, U.S. Judge Thomas Hixson, who is in charge of Toledo’s extradition process, threatened, on the 15th, to bring forward the trial and thus deny the additional time requested by his counsel if the infractions and lies on the part of the former president continue.