Peru court orders Keiko detention in corruption probe
LIMA: Peru’s powerful opposition leader Keiko Fujimori was taken into custody on Wednesday after a court ordered her held in preventive detention for three years pending the outcome of a corruption probe.
The 43-year-old daughter of disgraced and jailed former president Alberto Fujimori is accused of accepting US$1.2 million in illicit party funding from Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, for her 2011 presidential campaign.
In ordering her detention, judge Richard Concepcion Carhuancho said there was a ‘serious suspicion’ that Fujimori was running a ‘de facto criminal organisation that is entrenched within’ her Popular Force political party and had laundered illicit money.
Concepcion Carhuanco described Fujimori, who hugged her tearful US-born husband Mark Villanella in court before she was led away by police officers, as a ‘high flight risk’.
As such, her said, “the only necessary measure in her case is undoubtedly preventive detention.”
Public prosecutor Jose Domingo Perez had requested she be detained during the ongoing investigation into alleged illegal campaign funding.
Fujimori’s lawyer, Giuliana Loza is expected to appeal the verdict and has three days to do so.
The judge took eight hours to reach his verdict which almost certainly scuppers Fujimori’s hopes of running for the presidency in 2021.
Fujimori has twice before run for the presidency but lost out in a runoff both in 2011 and 2016, despite the Popular Force party she founded in 2001 winning the most votes in both those elections.
She had been the Andean country’s most popular politician and was trying to continue a family legacy begun by her father, the son of Japanese immigrants, who was president from 1990 to 2000. —