Peru remains at the forefront in the field of asset recovery due to its efforts to recover proceeds Vladimiro Montesinos Torres, the main advisor of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori from 1990 to 2000. The country recovered in less than three years, USD 175 million from Switzerland, United States, and Cayman Islands from Vladimir Montesinos’s criminal network of corruption. To do so, several reforms were introduced in the Peruvian legal system in order to prosecute the crimes of Fujimori regime.
First, they set up anti-corruption authorities and an An ‘Ad-hoc Prosecutorial Office’ to handle the highest profile cases. At the same time, the new Attorney-General assembled a team of specialized prosecutors, including forensic accountants and technical personnel from the national police. Later, Anti-corruption Courts of first instance and a Court of Appeal were created. In this context, many judicial authorities were themselves under investigation and the amount of difficult cases was increasing exponentially.
Secondly, Peruvian authorities adopted, by law, a type of plea bargaining mechanism available for investigations involving organized crime, not including criminal bosses and high ranking public officials. This implied that any member of a criminal organization involved in a picture of criminal charges had the possibility to provide information in return for a mitigated sentence or immunity from prosecution.
The most important reform was to give special influence to Attorney General, in particular the power of requiring restrictive provisional measures in preliminary investigations, before instituting formal proceedings. Besides, a complementary reform to deal with the adverse effects of immunity allowed the Attorney-General to initiate preliminary inquiries against high ranking public officials.
Furthermore, Congressional Investigative Commissions formed to inspect corruption were similarly allowed to require the same measures as the Attorney General. In short, several strategies and measures were implemented. They required to switch to a whole new perspective to handle things from the Peruvian authorities and, therefore, a lot of efforts to apply the methods designed to recover the proceeds derived from Corruption. The time it took for them to get the job done is still remarkable in the history of the recovery of assets located in foreign countries.
