A Peruvian court on Tuesday sentenced former President Ollanta Humala and his wife, Nadine Heredia, to 15 years in prison and nearly 3 million dollars in civil reparation for aggravated money laundering. The couple was found guilty of accepting illicit contributions in the same amount to finance Humala’s presidential campaigns.
A court in Lima, the capital of Peru, ruled that the couple accepted illegal funds from the then-Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, and the construction company Odebrecht to finance Humala’s presidential campaigns in 2006 and 2011. The tribunal ordered the immediate execution of the prison sentence in the preliminary ruling. Humala, who was present in court, was immediately taken into custody, while Heredia was absent from the session. Just hours before the verdict was announced, she requested political asylum at the Brazilian Embassy in an attempt to avoid imprisonment. Heredia is currently in Brazil with her son under the protection of the 1954 Convention on Diplomatic Asylum, to which both countries are signatories.
As the full reading of the verdict is scheduled for April 29 at 10 am, former congresswoman Rosa Bartra argues that, according to Article 7 of the Constitutional Procedural Code, the sentence must be enforced only after the full reading, not based on a preliminary ruling. Bartra maintains that, in an effort to prevent an escape, Peru may have opened the door to a potential constitutional appeal.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office had reportedly requested a 20-year prison sentence for Humala and 26 and a half years for Heredia, in addition to civil reparation exceeding 5 million dollars. According to the couple’s defense team, the prosecution failed to prove that, even if the funds were received, they originated from illicit sources. However, the prosecution maintains that it has provided sufficient evidence. As penal lawyer Andy Carrión explains, this ruling will definitely set the course for all other cases, not because other judges are bound by this decision, but because there will now be a judicial and interpretative framework for what is considered money laundering and what is not.
The trial, which lasted over three years and leaves Peru with yet another former president convicted of corruption, reflects a pattern that has become all too common among the country’s leaders in recent decades. Odebretch signed contracts with every Peruvian government from 1979 to 2016. In 2015, Congress established an investigate commission known as “Lava Jato” to examine the involvement of Peruvian officials with Odebretch. The investigation has led to 65 criminal convictions, 22 indictments involving the judiciary, and approximately 1.2 billion in civil reparation claims.
