Peru’s Former President & Wife Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison for Money Laundering

Ace News Desk – Peru’s former president and wife sentenced to 15 years in prison for an Odebrecht-linked money laundering scheme

Ollanta Humala was found guilty of laundering illicit funds from the troubled Brazilian construction company for his electoral campaigns.

A top court in Peru on Tuesday sentenced former President Ollanta Humala and his wife, Nadine Heredia, to 15 years in prison for illegally accepting payment from Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.

Humala is Peru’s second former president after Alejandro Toledo to be sentenced as part of the corruption scandal, in which Odebrecht paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to politicians and government officials in order to win construction contracts across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Judges in Peru’s National Superior Court found that Humala and Heredia received close to $3 million in electoral campaign contributions from Odebrecht and the government of Venezuela in 2006 and 2011, AP reported. Humala and his wife spent time in prison between 2017 and 2018 ahead of their court proceedings, which began in 2022, and were ordered to be incarcerated immediately.

On Tuesday, the court also ordered the arrest of Nadine Heredia’s brother, Ilán Heredia, after finding him guilty of being a “co-author of the crime of aggravated money laundering,” according to a written statement. The court also ordered all those convicted to pay civil damages amounting to 10 million soles ($2.7 million dollars).

The ruling comes five months after another former president, Alejandro Toledo, was given a 20-year sentence for taking $35 million in bribes from the construction company in exchange for approval to build a highway. Two more presidents have been accused by Peruvian authorities of benefitting from the Odebrecht bribery scheme.

In 2019, ICIJ’s Bribery Division investigation examined details from a trove of records from an Odebrecht division created primarily to manage the company’s bribes in exchange for public works contracts. The records were obtained by the Ecuadorian news organization La Posta and shared with ICIJ and 17 media partners across the hemisphere.

The revelations added to an already sprawling scandal that touched at least ten countries  in Latin America. Multiple prominent figures have since been arrested, and the scheme has been described by the United States Justice Department to be the “largest foreign bribery case in history.”

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