A United States judge has annulled the arrest warrant that was to be executed this Friday against former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo to be extradited to his country, where he is accused of corruption for the Odebrecht plot.
The former president of Peru (2001-2006), who lives in San Francisco (California), should have been arrested at 9:00 a.m. on the west coast of the United States, but the judge annulled the arrest warrant after a court of appeals admitted on Thursday the request of the defense of Toledo to delay the extradition for 14 days.
"Since Toledo cannot currently be extradited, the court annuls his arrest warrant and orders the bailiffs not to detain him," Judge Thomas Hixson has decreed in an order collected by the Efe news agency.
The magistrate had ordered on April 5 that the former Peruvian president be detained this Friday so that the United States State Department could proceed with the extradition approved last February. However, Hixson explained that on Thursday the appeals court ordered a stay of extradition for 14 days "to allow Toledo the opportunity to ask the court for reconsideration."
Toledo, 77, was arrested in 2019 in California and spent eight 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 court 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.
Toledo was investigated for the alleged commission of 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).
