Former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo asked a United States federal judge on Thursday to stop the arrest warrant against him in order to extradite him to Peru, where he is accused of corruption in the Odebrecht case.
The man who was president of the Andean country between 2001 and 2006 filed an urgent motion before Judge Beryl Howell, of the District Court of Columbia, to “suspend the detention and extradition.”
With this resource, Toledo tries to stop the arrest warrant issued yesterday, Wednesday, by California judge Thomas Hixson to send him to Peru.
The former president is forced to turn himself in to the authorities tomorrow morning at the Robert F. Peckham Building, headquarters of the Northern District Court of California, in the city of San José (California).
Toledo, a San Francisco resident, should have been arrested for extradition on April 7, but has been delaying the process through various legal resources.
Finally, the Ninth Circuit of Appeals denied the president’s request for a new hearing to reconsider his delivery to Peru, for which the US Attorney’s Office asked the judge on Wednesday to reactivate the arrest warrant.
Toledo, 77, was arrested in 2019 in California and spent 8 months in prison for risk of flight, although he was placed under house arrest in March 2020, with the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic.
Last September, the US Justice gave the green light for his extradition to Peru, having found sufficient evidence to justify this measure, which was endorsed last February by the State Department.
Toledo is charged in his country for having received some 34 million dollars from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, through a network of companies in tax havens through which he acquired million-dollar real estate properties in Peru.
The Odebrecht case, the largest corruption scandal in Latin America, also affected former Peruvian presidents Alan García (1985-1990 and 2006-2011), Ollanta Humala (2011-2016) and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016-2018), as well as the three-time presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter and political heir of former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000). EFE
Reference-aristeguinoticias.com
