Former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo was sentenced by a Lima court to 20 years and six months in prison for corruption and money laundering in the Brazilian company Odebrecht scandal.
"This court approves the request for a sentence of 20 years and six months in prison for Alejandro Toledo Manrique," the court announced on Monday at a hearing attended by the former head of state.
The former strongman of Peru (2001-2006), who accepted the sentence with apparent serenity, was found guilty of receiving tens of millions of dollars from the Brazilian civil construction giant.
Toledo has maintained his innocence since the Brazilian group gave statements to the US Justice Department in 2016 about a vast regional corruption system to obtain public contracts.
Toledo's lawyer Roberto Su told the press that he intends to appeal the sentence.
The former president was arrested in 2019 in the United States in connection with the scandal and placed under house arrest in California until extradited in April 2023, having been placed in pre-trial detention at the Barbadillo penitentiary, east of Lima.
Alejandro Toledo is the first of four former Peruvian presidents investigated in this scandal to be convicted.
The other three are Ollanta Humala (2011-2016), Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016-2018) and Alan Garcia (2006-2011), who committed suicide in 2019, when he was about to be arrested in this case.
At a previous hearing last week, the former center-right president again proclaimed his innocence. "I am innocent, I never made any agreement with [Jorge] Barata," the former director of Odebrecht in Peru, said.
However, prosecutor José Domingo Pérez pointed to evidence "that Alejandro Toledo demanded 35 million dollars [32 million euros] from Odebrecht" in exchange for sections of the Southern Interoceanic Road, which links the Peruvian Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast of Brazil .
At the time, the former president asked for clemency from the judges, citing his advanced age and state of health. "I want to go to a private clinic, please let me take care of myself or die at home," he asked.
Odebrecht was the most cited company in the Lava Jato anti-corruption investigation, which led to the arrest of dozens of Latin American political and business leaders.
The US Justice Department said Odebrecht distributed $788 million (€728 million) over more than a decade in a dozen Latin American countries and two in Africa.
When the first investigations began, in 2014, Odebrecht employed 180,000 people worldwide.
After Brazil, Peru is the second most affected country by this case, which has caused several political crises.
Odebrecht was ordered to pay compensation in several countries, including $2.6 billion (€2.4 billion) to the governments of Brazil, the United States and Switzerland.
