La Paz, May 23 (EFE) .- The Bolivian Prosecutor’s Office reported this Monday that it presented the formal accusation against Jorge Valda, former lawyer of the Peruvian Martín Belaunde and current jurist of the former temporary president Jeanine Áñez, for alleged suspicious banking movements and requests the maximum sentence which is 10 years.
The departmental prosecutor of La Paz, William Alave, stated that the lawyer is being investigated for the alleged crime of legitimizing illicit profits, for allegedly having carried out bank movements of large sums of money “that do not coincide” with his economic activity between 2008 and 2017, according to a bulletin from the State Attorney General’s Office.
Alave maintained that during the preparatory stage of the investigation “several indicative elements” have been collected, such as, for example, a financial intelligence report from 2017 and from other financial entities that indicate that the lawyer deposited large sums of money to his accounts. as well as those of their relatives.
“Among the deposits and transfers he made in two financial entities, a deposit for the payment of fees in the amount of 278,076 dollars stands out, an amount that is not related to his profile,” said the coordinator of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, Eddy Flores .
The report from the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) details some of the lawyer’s transactions, such as one for more than 19,000 dollars from an account in Peru and another 65 deposits to third-party accounts, according to the statement.
The jurist also took out a credit in 2009 of $68,000 that had to be paid until 2039, but in March 2015 he paid the total credit “two months before Belaunde’s escape” and an alleged tax evasion is also being investigated, indicates the bulletin.
With these data, the Public Ministry presented the formal accusation and asks for the maximum sentence for the crimes investigated, which is 10 years in prison.
The Peruvian Martín Belaunde, accused of alleged acts of corruption in his country, was extradited by Bolivia to Peru in May 2015, after being arrested in a town in the Bolivian Amazon when he was hiding in a house waiting to flee to Brazil.
The businessman had escaped days before from the house arrest he was serving in the house of relatives in La Paz, whose government was preparing his surrender to the Peruvian authorities after having twice rejected his request for refuge.
Peru requested Bolivia’s extradition of Belaunde for the crimes of embezzlement (misappropriation of public funds) and illicit association for allegedly managing the interests of private companies to award them contracts with the State in regional governments and thus obtain personal economic benefits.
The former lawyer from Belaunde is one of the lawyers of the former temporary president of Bolivia Jeanine Áñez, who has been preventively detained in a prison in La Paz for more than a year for the cases called “coup d’état I and II” due to the political crisis and social of 2019 after the failed elections.
(c) EFE Agency