US judge approves extradition of former Peruvian President Toledo | Crime News

Alejandro Toledo faces corruption charges related to the Odebrecht scandal in his home country.

U.S. judge approves extradition of former Peruvian president Alexandre ToledoIn 2019, he was arrested in the United States after facing corruption charges in his home country.

US District Judge Thomas Hickson ruled on Tuesday that the charges against Toledo met the standards set out in the extradition treaty between the United States and Peru.

Hickson wrote: “The court has heard and considered the criminal evidence and found it sufficient to maintain the collusion and money laundering charges under the extradition treaty between the United States of America and the Republic of Peru.”

In 2018, Peru requested the extradition of Toledo, who served as the country’s president from 2001 to 2006, for accepting millions of dollars in bribes from Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company involved in a large-scale corruption case in South America.

The State Department will have the final decision on whether to extradite Toledo. Toledo was detained by US authorities in 2019 but was later released under house arrest.

Hickson admitted in his decision that the case against the former president was “not secretive,” but said that “there may be reasons to believe that Toledo was guilty of collusion and money laundering.”

Toledo denied the charges against him.

According to Reuters, the former Peruvian president lives in California, close to the Stanford University campus. Graduated from Stanford University, Toledo served as a visiting scholar at the university in 2016.

The testimony of Jorge Barata, former head of Odebrecht in Peru, and Josef Maiman, an acquaintance of Toledo, played a key role in Hixson’s decision.

“The testimony of Balata and Maiman, together with Toledo’s admission in the extradition process, that he eventually received approximately US$500,000 in Odebrecht bribe funds… Establish possible reasons to believe that Toledo was guilty of collusion and Money laundering,” the judge wrote in his ruling.

The Odebrecht scandal shook South America, and the company admitted to paying US$800 million to officials in the region in 2016 to secure public works contracts.

In 2019, the former President of Peru Alan Garcia When the authorities tried to arrest him in connection with the scandal, he shot himself.A year ago, the then president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Impeached for alleged involvement in the scandal-he is still under investigation.