Lima: Former president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, who is serving a 25-year prison term for crimes against humanity, was Thursday, sentenced to eight more years in prison on embezzlement charges.
Fujimori, 76, was convicted by Peru’s Supreme Court (CSL) of embezzling 122 million nuevo sols (about $41 million) in public funds to buy favourable press coverage during his 2000 re-election campaign, Xinhua reported. He was also ordered to pay $1 million for ordering funds to be diverted from the armed forces and the National Intelligence Service to newspapers for discrediting his political opponents.
The sentence is the fifth handed down against the former president since he was extradited from Chile in 2007, and will begin in April 2021. Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in jail in 2009 after he was deemed responsible for two massacres carried out by the security forces as well as the kidnapping of a journalist and a businessman during his 1990-2000 tenure.
The former president has been convicted in three other cases on less serious charges. According to Peruvian law, sentences cannot be served simultaneously. In his last court testimony Dec 29, Fujimori pleaded innocence.
