US agrees to extradite former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo

By Laura Gamba

BOGOTA, Colombia (AA) - The US State Department has agreed to extradite former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo at the request of authorities in Lima over corruption charges, Peru’s Attorney General’s Office said Tuesday.

"The Attorney General's Office, as the central authority on extraditions, informs that it has learned that the Department of State of the United States of America has granted the extradition of Alejandro Toledo Manrique for the crimes of collusion and money laundering," it said on Twitter.

Toledo is accused of having received bribes of more than $30 million from the Brazilian company Odebrecht in exchange for help securing a highway concession. A judge in Peru requested 20 years in prison for the former president.

Toledo has denied any wrongdoing.

The former president has lived in the US since leaving the presidency in 2006. In 2011, however, he ran in the presidential elections again but was defeated in the first round.

Toledo was arrested in the US in 2019 after Peru formally requested his extradition. He spent eight months in prison and was allowed to move to house arrest in March 2020 due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The process had been suspended months ago until a San Francisco court revived the measure in October 2022.

The governments must now reach an agreement to coordinate Toledo's return to his country. Former anti-corruption prosecutor Ivan Meini told local media that Toledo's surrender to Peru "should be imminent because there are no more appeals to file and the extradition procedure is over."

Peru has been rocked by the Odebrecht case, the biggest corruption scandal in Latin America. Former presidents Alan Garcia, Ollanta Humala and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski have also been accused, as well as three-time presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori.