Prosecutor requests preventive detention for Peruvian candidate Keiko Fujimori

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Public Prosecutor José Domingo Pérez, a member of the Lava Jato special team, requested this Thursday to revoke the summons with restrictions that was issued against Peruvian candidate Keiko Fujimori and that she be remanded in custody for having failed to comply with judicial resolutions.

In the document sent to Judge Víctor Zúñiga Urday, the prosecutor argues that the presidential candidate for the Fuerza Popular party has failed to comply with the legal rules imposed while she is being investigated for a money laundering crime, such as not communicating with witnesses linked to the case of the alleged illicit contributions to her 2011 and 2016 campaigns.

“It has been determined once again that the accused Fujimori Higuchi does not comply with the restriction of not communicating with witnesses; since it has been noted as a public and notorious fact that she communicates with the witness Miguel Torres Morales,” the text states.

Specifically, Domingo Perez cites the conference held the day before, in which the lawyer Torres was presented as a political spokesman for the legal entity of Fuerza Popular.

Both were together at the same table during the press conference in which the candidate’s party asked the electoral authorities to annul 802 voting records, representing some 200,000 votes, under accusations of irregularities and “table fraud” in the presidential elections held last Sunday.

Fujimori faces a prosecutor’s request for more than 30 years in prison for alleged money laundering in the financing of her previous electoral campaigns, a trial she would avoid if elected.