When Alejandro Toledo was extradited to Peru on Sunday, April 23, after a long judicial process, a question flew over the newsrooms: what would be the fate of Eliane Karp, the Belgian anthropologist who was the first lady of the country between 2001 and 2006? ? Although Karp, of great prominence in that five-year period, has not been involved in the Odebrecht case, where her husband allegedly received a bribe of 35 million dollars to favor the Brazilian construction company with the award of the Interoceanic highway, she is accused of the alleged crime of money laundering in the Ecoteva case. Since 2017, an 18-month preventive detention order has weighed on her and, since 2019, a request for a sentence of 16 years and eight months.
This morning Peru woke up to a rumor that was confirmed as hours went by: Eliane Karp traveled Tuesday night on a commercial flight from San Francisco, where she had lived for decades, to Tel Aviv, the second most populous city in Israel. It was a fear that various lawyers and political analysts have warned about in recent weeks. Rafael Vela, the prosecutor in charge of her, indicated that Karp had two possibilities to evade Peruvian justice: go to Belgium, her country of origin, or Israel, where she has Jewish ancestry on her father’s side. Peru does not have an Extradition Treaty with Israel. Karp was well aware of this, and since she had no impediment to leave the United States, she chose the second option. This was confirmed this afternoon by Prime Minister Alberto Otárola: “the Department of Justice of the United States has informed the Embassy of Peru that she took a flight to Israel (…) yes, the lady did indeed land in this country. Through the Foreign Ministry we will follow up on the case, ”she said briefly.
Last week, Roberto Su, Alejandro Toledo’s lawyer, denied the foreseeable: “She has Belgian and Israeli nationality, but at no time has she told me that she is going to escape or that she is going to leave (…) Eliane (Karp) already she has her passport, she wants to come to Peru,” he said. However, Su also made it clear that Karp would not return to Peru until the preventive detention order was rescinded, a measure that his client considered “unfair” because in his view it was a reprisal for being Toledo’s wife.
At the beginning of 2013, it was detected that Eva Fernenburg, mother of Eliane Karp and mother-in-law of Toledo, had made purchases of luxury real estate through her company Ecoteva Consulting Group. According to the tax thesis, it is an offshore company, incorporated in Costa Rica, through which the former presidential couple would have tried to camouflage the million-dollar bribes they would have received from the Brazilian construction companies. When the former leader of the political group Perú Posible was consulted on the subject, he used to say that it was “compensation that his mother-in-law had received for being a victim of the Holocaust”, however, he was never able to prove that he was on the list of people compensated.
Days after Toledo returned to the country she ruled in the early 2000s, Eliane Karp recovered her passport by order of Northern California judge Thomas S. Hixson, the same one who also ruled that the bond she paid with her be returned. some collaborators to achieve the parole of her husband in 2019. It is about a million dollars, half of which was paid in cash and the other with the security of real estate. The former first lady received $175,000 plus interest earned.
Recently, the Public Ministry indicated that it had sent all the necessary documents to the United States to support Karp’s extradition request, but that everything was left in their hands. “The document was presented a long time ago (December 2021), we ask for your qualification and response, but we are left at the expense of what the American legislation and its authorities refer to,” said Edgar Rebaza, head of the Office for International Judicial Cooperation and Extraditions. .
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