By Luc Cohen and Marcelo Rochabrun
NEW YORK/LIMA (Reuters) – The United States will return to Peru about $686,000 seized from a former president of the country who had received bribes from the Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said Odebrecht paid $25 million in bribes to Alejandro Toledo, who was Peru’s president between 2001 and 2006, for highway construction contracts.
Prosecutors said Toledo used $1.2 million of the money in 2007 to buy a Maryland home, which he sold eight years later.
In 2020, a judge ruled that prosecutors could seize money Toledo had been keeping in an account at Bank of America.
“Civil forfeiture serves a critical role in depriving criminals of their ill-gotten gains, regardless of their status,” Breon Peace, the top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, said in a statement.
Odebrecht has admitted that it doled out bribes to governments across Latin America, to help build its vast construction empire.
Toledo has denied soliciting or receiving bribes, and has not been criminally charged in the United States.
He could not be reached for comment, and his U.S. lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Toledo now lives in California, where he is fighting Peru’s attempts to extradite him to face Odebrecht-related graft charges.
He was represented at extradition proceedings by a public defender, and said he had no income or savings.
The U.S. State Department will decide whether to extradite him.
Peru’s foreign ministry tweeted in February that it had agreed with the United States on repatriating Toledo’s funds.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York and Marcelo Rochabrun in Lima; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
