Washington, Apr 20 (EFE).- A federal judge in the United States on Thursday rejected a request submitted by former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo to stop an arrest warrant against him in order to extradite him to Peru, where he is accused of corruption for the Odebrecht case.
The Court of the District of Columbia rejected this afternoon the motion of urgency presented hours before by Toledo’s lawyers, arguing that they did not present new arguments to defend their case.
Toledo’s lawyers argued before the court that the executive’s extradition process should be analyzed by the judicial branch independently, according to Judge Beryl Howell in her decision.
With this Thursday’s ruling, an arrest warrant issued yesterday, Wednesday, by California Judge Thomas Hixson to send Toledo to Peru remains in place.
The former president is forced to turn himself in to the authorities this Friday morning at the Robert F. Peckham building, headquarters of the Northern District Court of California, in the city of San José (California).
Toledo, a San Francisco resident, should have been arrested for extradition on April 7, but has delayed the process through various legal resources.
The Ninth Circuit of Appeals ended up denying the former president’s request for a new hearing to be held to reconsider his delivery to Peru, for which the US Attorney’s Office asked the judge on Wednesday to reactivate the arrest warrant.
Toledo, 77, was arrested in 2019 in California and spent 8 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 Justice gave the green light for his extradition to Peru, having found sufficient evidence to justify this measure, which was endorsed in February of this year 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.
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).
