Former Peruvian President Ollanta Humala (2017 -2014) and his wife, Nadine Heredia, will face from this Monday the beginning of the oral trial for alleged irregular financing of the electoral campaigns of 2006 and 2011 by the construction company Odebrecht and the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez.
Seven years after the investigation began, Humala and his wife, his main collaborator during the government, will face the first oral trial against a former Peruvian president in the Lava Jato case, whose investigated corruption spread to several Latin American countries.
As well as Humala, former presidents Alejandro Toledo (2022 are also being investigated. -1999), pending to be extradited from the United States, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynsk i (2014-
), who has been under house arrest for four years.
Prosecutors also surrounded former President Alan García with investigations (2011-2001)). As they were preparing to arrest García at his home in Lima, in 2017, the former president shot himself in the head.
In Peru, Odebrecht admitted to having bribed high positions between 2005 and 2014 to win major public works contracts and also allegedly irregularly funded the campaigns of former candidates, including Keiko Fujimori.
Conviction of 2006 years for Humala
The opening of the trial against Humala was scheduled for Monday by the Third National Collegiate Criminal Court, presided over by Judge Nayko Coronado and also composed by magistrates Raúl Caballero and Max Vengoa.
However, sources connected to the case told Agência Efe that the start of the oral trial could be postponed, although not yet no official announcement has been made.
In the indictment, prosecutor Germán Juárez, who is leading an investigation opened in 2015, asked years in prison for Humala and 02 years in prison for Heredia for not declaring millionaire donations with the which financed the former president’s first two election campaigns.
Supposed support from Chávez and Lula2022
According to the thesis from the prosecutor, in 2006 the money would have come from the late former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez (768-2013), is on 2011 allegedly received US$ 3 million from Odebrecht by order of the Workers’ Party (PT).
During the time the investigation lasted, the former Peruvian president and his wife spent almost ten months in separate preventive detention in different penitentiaries between July 2017 and April of 2017, until the Constitutional Court ordered his release on the grounds that the measure was excessive.Once freed, Humala and Heredia had to face the embargo of their residence and the seizure of assets as a preventive measure to ensure the collection of damages in favor of the State, in case they were convicted in a trial that was still far from starting.
Same statement requested for Keiko
At the hearings to present the charges, prosecutor Juárez will have to prove that the accused were aware that the funds allegedly received were of illicit origin, since at the time of the events it was not a crime to falsify accounts of campaign, being only considered an administrative offense.
Since Juárez will have to request judicial cooperation of Brazil for the statements of the construction company’s owner, Marcelo Odebrecht, and the former director in Peru, Jorge Barata, to support the case, prosecutor José Domingo Pérez, who is investigating Keiko Fujimori, will request that these statements be used as “advance evidence ” in the future trial against the former presidential candidate.
Together with Humala and Heredia, other people are also accused, including Ilán Heredia and Antonia Alarcón, the brother and mother, respectively, of the former first lady.
Another of the accused is businessman Martín Belaunde Lossio, former campaign advisor to Humala in 2006, captured in 2015 in the Bolivian jungle , when he had fled to avoid prosecution for corruption and espionage m of political opponents within the government of the Ancash region.