The US agrees to extradite former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo
The United States State Department has granted the extradition of former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006), requested by the South American country’s judicial system for corruption crimes, the Peruvian Attorney General’s Office announced Tuesday (21).
“The Peruvian Attorney General’s Office, as the central authority on extraditions, reports that it has learned that the State Department of the United States of America has granted the extradition of Alejandro Toledo Manrique for the crimes of collusion and money laundering,” the Attorney General’s Office announced on Twitter.
The prosecution added that the Office of International Judicial Cooperation and Extraditions of the Prosecutor General’s Office “is coordinating with domestic and foreign authorities the upcoming execution of his extradition.”
The former president was arrested in 2019 in California, where he has lived for several years, and spent eight months in prison for flight risk.
However, he was allowed to leave the penitentiary and move to house arrest in March 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Former prosecutor Ivan Meini told radio station “RPP” that Toledo’s extradition to Peru “should be imminent because there are no more appeals to file and the extradition process is finished.”
“What should happen in the next hours or days is for the governments to reach an agreement on how to organize Toledo’s return to Peru,” he analyzed.
In addition, he considered it “likely” that Peruvian prosecutors will request that the former president be sent to pre-trial detention while he is tried and that he serve his sentence in prison built on a police base in Lima, where former governors Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) and Pedro Castillo (2021-2022) are also being held.
Toledo is accused in his native country of receiving tens of millions of dollars in bribes from the Odebrecht company in exchange for favoring the construction company in its business transactions in Peru while he was still president.
Specifically, the former president was investigated for allegedly committing the crimes of money laundering, collusion, and influence peddling in connection with contracts awarded to Odebrecht for the construction of the Interoceanic Highway between Brazil and Peru.
With information from EFE
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