The sentence for the son of the former president was suspended until the second instance ratifies the ruling, so he will not go to jail immediately.
The Peruvian ex-congressman Kenji Fujimorison of former president Alberto Fujimori and brother of political leader Keiko, was sentenced on Tuesday to four and a half years in prison for the crime of influence peddling, that he used to get the votes of parliamentarians in 2018 to avoid the dismissal of the then president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.
The Special Criminal Chamber of the Peruvian Supreme Court indicated in its reading of the sentence summary that the prison sentence for Kenji is suspended until the second judicial instance decides to ratify the ruling, for which reason You will not go to jail immediately.
“Special Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court sentences #KenjiFujimori, Guillermo Bocangel and Bienvenido Ramírez to four years and six months of #Effective Prison, and suspends their execution until the sentence is final and/or consented,” the Peruvian Judiciary told through a message on Twitter.
The court found that Kenji sought to buy congressional votes to prevent Parliament, then controlled by the opposition led by his sister Keiko, from deposing Kuczynski from his position as president in March 2018, for his alleged business with the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.
Also sentenced to prison were former congressmen Guillermo Bocángel, Bienvenido Ramírez -for whom the sentence is also suspended until the second instance- and a parliamentary adviser, Alexei Toledo, who was left with alternative measures to prison: he must appear before the judge every month and has to forbidden to change residence.
they all stayed disabled in addition to public function for 18 monthswhile the court ordered that they jointly pay a civil reparation of 500,000 soles, equivalent to 130,761 US dollars.
The vote-buying plot was revealed when then-parliamentarian Moisés Mamani, aligned with Keiko Fujimori, presented videos in which Kenji and his accused colleagues were seen offering government benefits in exchange for voting against Kuczynski’s removal. Faced with the evidence, Kuczynski resigned from the presidency. Then, Martín Vizcarra succeeded him.
The sentence of former president Alberto Fujimori
The former president is complying with a sentence handed down in 2009 for the massacres in Barrios Altos and La Cantuta, which led to the death of 25 peoplein total, as well as for the kidnapping of a journalist and a businessman after the “self-coup” of 1992.
On April 8, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CourtHR) ordered the Peruvian State to refrain from complying with a resolution of the Constitutional Court (TC) that restored the pardon granted in December 2017 by then-President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski ( 2016-2018).
After learning of the decision of the international court, the opposition leader Keiko Fujimori, the eldest daughter of the former president, assured that she does not lose faith that her father will be released, and described the ruling as “absolutely unfair for a sick and elderly person” to the one that causes “a lot of pain”.
A similar situation led to his urgent admission on March 3, when he also suffered a severe arrhythmia in his detention center that caused fear for his life. Eleven days later he was discharged and returned to the police base where he is the only prisoner.
With information from AFP and AP.