Former executives of the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, Marcelo Odebrecht and Jorge Barata, among others, will testify in the next trial of former Peruvian President Ollanta Humala for money laundering to be held from January 2023.
Odebrecht’s appearance follows a series of controversies with the Lava Jato special team, after Brazilian judicial authorities suspended international cooperation following a lawsuit by the company — now Novonor — denouncing an alleged breach by the Peruvian side.
That prevented access to the interrogations of Odebrecht, Barata and other officials of the Brazilian giant a month ago. However, a few weeks ago, Peruvian prosecutors Rafael Vela and José Domingo Pérez signed new procedural commitments with the company’s lawyers to close additional investigations, except for the cases with an agreement of effective collaboration.
Marcelo Odebrecht is scheduled to testify on January 16 and Jorge Barata a day later, reports the newspaper ‘La República’.
Recently, Peru’s Supreme Court rejected the appeal filed by former president Humala to overturn the indictment for alleged money laundering and criminal organization, which kept him in pre-trial detention between June 2017 and April 2018. The case also involves his wife, Nadine Heredia, and several representatives of the Peruvian Nationalist Party.
According to the accusation, the companies OAS and Odebrecht — the latter present in numerous corruption cases throughout the continent — would have irregularly financed Humala’s campaign in 2011, which gave him access to the House of Pizarro after defeating Keiko Fujimori; while in 2006 he would have received funding from the late former president of Venezuela Hugo Chávez.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
