Kenji Fujimori was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for flu trafficking in Peru

Former Peruvian MP Kenji Fujimorison of former president Alberto Fujimori and brother of political leader Keiko, was sentenced on Tuesday at four and a half years in prison for the crime of influence traffic, which he used to get the votes of parliamentarians in 2018 to avoid the ousting of then-President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.

The Special Criminal Chamber of the Peruvian Supreme Court indicated in its reading of the summary of the sentence that the prison sentence for Kenji is suspended until the second judicial instance decides to ratify the sentence, which is why You won’t go to jail right away.

“The 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 sentences are final and/or agreed,” the Peruvian judiciary through a message on Twitter.

The court found that Kenji he tried to buy congressional votes to prevent Parliament, then controlled by the opposition led by his sister Keiko, from deposing Kuczynski as president in March 2018, over his alleged affairs with the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.

Also sentenced to prison are former deputies Guillermo Bocángel, Bienvenido Ramírez – for whom the sentence is also suspended up to the second degree – and a parliamentary adviser, Alexei Toledo, who has been granted alternative measures to prison: he must appear before the judge every month and is prohibited from changing residence.

they all stayed disabled in addition to public service for 18 monthswhile the court ordered them jointly to pay civil damages of 500,000 soles, equal to 130,761 US dollars.

The vote-buying plot was revealed when then-MP 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 the removal of Kuczynski. Facing 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 an entrepreneur after the “autocoup” of 1992.

On April 8, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (HR Court) ordered the Peruvian state to refrain from complying with a Constitutional Court (TC) resolution reinstating the pardon granted in December 2017 by then President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016 -2018).

Upon learning of the international tribunal’s decision, opposition leader Keiko Fujimori, the former president’s eldest daughter, assured that she did not lose faith that her father will be released, and called the sentence “absolutely unfair for a sick and elderly person” to one that causes “a lot of pain”.

A similar situation led to his urgent hospitalization on March 3, when he also suffered a severe arrhythmia in his detention center which caused fear for his life. Eleven days later he was released and taken back to the police base where he is the only detainee.

With information from AFP and AP.