The Supreme Court has turned down an appeal by former President Alberto Fujimori and confirmed the sentence of seven and a half years for a conviction on corruption.
The Court also ordered the payment of S/.3 million (just over US$1 m) as civil reparation to the State, which is to be paid by Fujimori and his co-defendants, former cabinet ministers Carlos Boloña, Carlos Bergamino and Federico Salas.
In the July 2009 trial, Fujimori partially accepted the charges, but refused to accept criminal responsibility, the sentence or the civil reparations.
The charges against Fujimori were the use of $15 million of state money to pay his de-facto intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, ostensibly as severance pay or compensation for years of service. Fujimori enacted an urgent decree in July 2000 to pave the way for the payment. According to Carlos Boloña, his then Finance Minister, the payment was made to solve the governance problem that arose when the scandal of widespread corruption broke, with a video of Montesinos paying a new member of Congress to cross the aisle and join Fujimori’s parliamentary bench.
In April 2009, three months before the corruption trial began, Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment on charges of human rights abuses. An appeal has been filed by Fujimori’s lawyer, Cesar Nagasaki, with the Constitutional Court on the claim that the trial judges were not impartial.
