Washington (EFE).- A United States appeals court suspended for 14 days the extradition to Peru of the former president of the Andean country Alejandro Toledo, accused of corruption within the Odebrecht plot, local media reported this Friday.
The decision of the court of appeals for the Ninth Circuit, located in San Francisco (California), temporarily halts the order that weighed on Toledo so that he turned himself in this Friday before the authorities to proceed with his extradition.
Toledo’s defense had requested a 14-day suspension on Thursday to give time for a court to hear the politician’s appeal.
The former president of Peru (2001-2006), a San Francisco resident, has been in a legal battle to prevent his shipment to the Andean country since he was arrested by US authorities in 2019.
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.
Specifically, Toledo was investigated for allegedly committing the crimes of money laundering, collusion and influence peddling, in relation to contracts awarded to Odebrecht for the construction of the Interoceanic Route between Brazil and 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).