Peru court orders release of ex-president Humala and wife

LIMA: Peru’s Constitutional Court ordered that former president Ollanta Humala and his wife be released from preventative detention and allowed to remain free for his corruption trial, his lawyer said.

Cesar Nakazaki said on Twitter the court had accepted a petition by Humala and his wife Nadine Heredia for a habeas corpus, allowing them to remain free while they attend trial.

The pair have been in prison since July awaiting trial on charges of money laundering.

They allegedly received millions of dollars in illegal campaign donations from Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht ahead of the 2011 election.

In February 2017, Jorge Barata, Odebrecht’s former Peru chief, told prosecutors he gave Humala 3 million in cash at the request of former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was himself jailed for corruption earlier this month.

Several months later, Peruvian judge Richard Concepcion Carhuancho ordered that the couple be held in pre-trial detention on grounds there was a ‘high probability’ they would try and evade justice.

Humala, who ruled between 2011 and 2016, is one of four former Peruvian heads of state caught up in the vast Odebrecht corruption scandal that has engulfed Latin America – although he is the only one who had been jailed so far.

The other three also implicated in the scandal are Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Alan Garcia and Alejandro Toledo, who is currently in the United States fighting off Peruvian efforts to have him extradited. — AFP