Martin Vizcarra is new Peruvian president after resignation of Pablo Kuczynski

Peru's congress has voted to accept the resignation of President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Sputnik reported.

Martin Vizcarra is sworn in as Peruvian president after predecessor ousted over corruption charges. Martin Vizcarra, a 55-year-old engineer and technocrat who also was Peru's ambassador to Canada, took the oath of office shortly after 1 p.m. and was presented with the presidential sash by congressional president Luis Galarreta.

"With faith and optimism, Peru will always move forward," Vizcarra said in brief remarks.

105 lawmakers voted for the president's resignation, while 11 voted against and 4 abstained.

Earlier, the Peruvian Congress, which has accepted Kuczynski's resignation, stated that it would debate the matter. Peruvian Vice President Martin Vizcarra will likely be sworn in as president, according to reports.</s>A Peruvian judge on Saturday barred former President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski from leaving the country for 18 months.

The ruling by Judge Juan Carlos Sanchez came while police were raiding two of Kuczynski's homes, looking for evidence that could tie him to a massive corruption scheme.

Kuczynski, 79, resigned on Wednesday just hours before a parliamentary impeachment vote amid growing questions surrounding massive payments to his consulting firm a decade ago when he was finance minister.

Watch video 02:16 Share Protests erupt in Peru Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/2pvnc Protests erupt in Peru after Kuczynski pardons Fujimori

Anti-corruption prosecutor Hamilton Castro told the court there was a long history in Peru that justified restricting Kuczynski's movements.

"Peru since the 19th century has watched the sad show as presidents and ex-presidents flee the country and justice," he said, in asking the court to bar Kuczynski from leaving the country. "This is the historical behavior that we seekers of justice have to take into account."

Kuczynski was not present in the courtroom Saturday as his lawyer promised his client would fully cooperate with the probe and would abide by the prosecutor's request to stay in the country.

Sanchez agreed with the prosecutor's request in issuing his order.

"The legal argument is well founded to impede Citizen Pedro Pablo Kuczynski from exiting the country," he said.

Massive corruption scandal

Former Peruvian President Kuczynski waves as he leaves office after announcing his resignation on Wednesday

Prosecutors are investigating payments of more than $780,000 made to Kuczynski's consulting firm from the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht. Given that some of the payments were made at the same time Kuczynski was a government minister there are suspicions that the money was given in return for political favors.

Kuczynski, a former Wall Street investor, has denied any wrongdoing. He said the Westfield Capital consulting firm was being managed by his business partner at the time and that he paid taxes on all earnings.

But the corruption scandal appears bigger than Kuczynski. Odebrecht has admitted to paying a staggering $800 million in bribes to an array of officials across Latin America, including $29 million in Peru.

Kuczynski is the fourth former Peruvian president to be investigated for taking bribes from Odebrecht. One is currently in jail but another, Alejandro Toledo, has refused to return to Peru from the US to face charges. He is suspected of receiving as much $20 million in bribes from Odebrecht during his presidency.

Martin Vizcarra, the former vice-president, is sworn-in as president in Lima on Friday

Kuczynski was a finance minister in the Toledo government from 2001 – 2006. He had denied all links to the construction giant until the firm revealed it issued the bribes in exchange for contracts in December.

On Friday, Martin Vizcarra, Kuczynski's vice president, was sworn in as Peru's new president.

bik/sms (AP, AFP, Reuters, dpa)

DW editors send out a selection of the day's hard news and quality feature journalism. You can sign up to receive it directly here.</s>March 24 (UPI) -- Martín Vizcarra is the new president of Peru, having been sworn on Friday.

He stepped into a role left vacant when former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned this week amid a corruption probe into the Odebrecht scandal that revealed a pattern of illegal behavior by the veteran politician. The 79-year-old admitted accepting $700,000 from an Odebrecht affiliate for contracts.

Vizcarra brings relatively little political experience to Peru's highest office. Prior to serving as an ambassador to Canada and first vice president, Vizcarra was a one-term governor of a small mining state.

During his swearing-in ceremony, Vizcarra said he would bring Peru's political parties together to fight corruption.

"The moment has arrived to say enough," Vizcarra said. "We are a country with a future, but that future depends on our behavior."

Last year, Odebrecht, a construction firm, told the U.S. Department of Justice that it shelled out some $800 million in bribes to secure infrastructure contracts. Between 2005 and 2014, the company paid Peruvian officials $29 million.

The Odebrecht corruption scandal has spanned the entirety of Latin America, but Kuczynski is the first president to be forced from office.

Protesters lined the streets of Lima, Peru's capital, on Thursday night to deride Kuczynski and challenge Vizcarra's ascension, a longtime ally of the disgraced president.

"Get rid of them all," activists shouted.

But while many citizens see the country's political class as corrupt, few know anything about their new president. A poll conducted earlier this month found 81 percent of Peruvians failed to recognize Vizcarra's name.</s>In December, 2016, at a private dinner with a handful of friends in a hotel in the Peruvian colonial city of Arequipa, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Peru’s new President, sipped on a Martini and grumbled about his political enemies. He called them “the Fujis,” a derisive reference to Keiko Fujimori, a former member of Congress and the leader of the Fuerza Popular Party; Kenji Fujimori, Keiko’s brother and also a member of Fuerza Popular; and Alberto Fujimori, their father and the country’s disgraced former President, who was doing time in prison. That June, Kuczynski—or P.P.K., as he is widely known—had unexpectedly defeated Keiko Fujimori in Peru’s Presidential election, winning by less than one per cent of the over-all vote. But Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular Party still dominated Congress. The Fujis, Kuczynski said, were clearly determined to make his life in office impossible; they had been blocking his Cabinet choices and voting against everything he proposed. Unless he could find a way to halt them, he would have a hard time getting anything done.

Kuczynski’s worries turned out to be well placed. On Wednesday, one day ahead of an all-but-certain impeachment vote in Congress, he appeared on television to announce his resignation from the Presidency. Seated at a desk and flanked by his Cabinet members, who stood uncomfortably behind him, Kuczynski fulminated against those who had driven him from office. He said that he had been falsely painted as corrupt, and that his opponents had brought about “a situation of ungovernability.” For the good of Peru, he said, he was stepping down.

Kuczynski’s Presidency had been hanging by a thread since the end of last year, when he narrowly survived a first impeachment vote. His opponents—led by “the Fujis”—had moved against him following revelations that, while he had been a minister in a previous government, his private investment company had received several million dollars in payments from the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht. For the past several years, Odebrecht has been implicated in one of Latin America’s largest-ever corruption scandals, centered in Brazil and known there as Operation Car Wash. Odebrecht officials, who have been coöperating with prosecutors in exchange for lesser jail time, have revealed that, over a decade, the company spent eight hundred million dollars in bribes around Latin America to secure official contracts worth billions. They have provided evidence showing that twenty-nine million dollars of the total went into officials’ pockets in Peru. Both of P.P.K.’s immediate predecessors, Alejandro Toledo and Ollanta Humala, were fingered as recipients of some of the bribe money. Early last year, Humala was arrested and imprisoned, where he remains, awaiting trial, while Toledo, who has been convicted in absentia, has refused to come home from an aerie in California.

Kuczynski had denied ever receiving any payments from Odebrecht. But late last year it emerged that while he was serving as a minister in Toledo’s government, a business partner had received money from the company. Kuczynski claimed not to know about the payments, which were apparently legal ones—Odebrecht’s officials, who knew about such things, have said that the fees paid to Kuczynski’s firm were aboveboard and not part of their bribery scheme. Still, things did not look good.

In an atmosphere of gathering public mistrust, Kuczynski’s moral character was called into question. He defended himself, but clumsily, in a public television roundtable with journalists, and then, when the impeachment vote came to a head, he survived thanks only to the abstentions of a few Fuerza Popular congressmen loyal to Keiko Fujimori’s brother Kenji. This raised some eyebrows. Three days later, when Kuczynski issued a pardon to the ailing, imprisoned Fujimori senior, it was clear to everyone that a deal had been done. Kuczynski was excoriated by many of his former allies, and a number of his ministers resigned in disgust.

Kuczynski’s reprieve did not last long. This week, as he and his opponents squared off for another impeachment vote, several videos emerged, apparently shot last December. They show Kenji Fujimori, a lawyer for Kuczynski, and a senior government official offering to give a congressman a cut from public-works contracts in return for his support for Kuczynski in the first impeachment vote. Kuczynski denied any knowledge of the shenanigans apparently undertaken on his behalf, but the damage was done, and his resignation came within twenty-four hours.

The great irony of Kuczynski’s downfall is that he ran for the Presidency on a promise to bring transparency to government. It was also a dismal end to a long and distinguished public career, one that at its height—immediately after he won the Presidency—had appeared to offer a fresh start to a country with a calamitous, even shameful, recent political history.

One could choose different moments to begin the chronology, but most Peruvians would agree that the country’s fall from grace, and from self-faith, began with Fujimori’s ten-year Presidency, which ended ignominiously in 2000, when he fled the country to Japan, in the midst of an erupting corruption scandal involving his right-hand man, Vladimiro Montesinos, Peru’s spy chief. Fujimori informed his countrymen of his resignation by fax from Tokyo. After five years in Japan, the ex-President travelled to Chile, where the government arrested him and extradited him back to Peru for trial. He was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for crimes against humanity and corruption—until Kuczynski’s pardon last December. (Montesinos, meanwhile, was run to ground in 2001 in Venezuela. Since being brought back to Peru he has remained in prison, where he has been periodically tried and convicted of crimes ranging from torture and bribery to drug and arms trafficking. In his latest trial, in 2016, he was sentenced to twenty-five more years in jail. Now seventy-two, he seems unlikely ever to leave prison.)

Peruvians are reeling from a lack of faith in their institutions and their national morale is at an all-time low. A tweet I saw from a Peruvian on Friday seemed to say it all: “By the way, what do you think about Perú? It’s latin america, we have no hope.” Kuczynski has been supplanted by his Vice-President, Martín Vizcarra, and the Fujimori siblings have been duking it out in Peru’s congress, with Keiko excoriating her brother for his involvement in a vote-buying scheme, and Kenji blaming his sister for sending a loyalist spy to make the secret videotapes and releasing them. It was all rather creepy, a disquieting echo of the behavior that cost their father the Presidency eighteen years ago. Kenji Fujimori quit the Fuerza Popular Party in March, and promised to form his own, with an eye, evidently, to run against his sister in 2021. Recalling that December, 2016, dinner with Kuczynski, I remember him saying that unless the Fujis could be stopped, he was doomed, and he was right. Now the question is, what lies ahead for Peru?</s>A Peruvian judge on Saturday imposed travel restrictions on former President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who resigned this week while facing near-certain

 impeachment over ties to a construction firm at the heart of a graft investigation.

The order by Judge Juan Carlos Sanchez bans Kuczynski from leaving Peru for 18 months while his links to Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company that has acknowledged bribing officials across Latin America, are investigated.

"The legal argument is well founded to impede citizen Pedro Pablo Kuczynski from exiting the country," the order said.

The ex-president's lawyer, Cesar Nakazaki, said Kuczynski would abide by the order and cooperate with the investigation.

State security agents, meanwhile, searched two houses belonging to Kuczynski, a former Wall Street banker.

Kuczynski, who denies wrongdoing, resigned on Wednesday. Two days later his vice president, Martin Vizcarra, was sworn in as Peru's new leader, promising to fight corruption "at any cost."

Vizcarra said he would form a completely new cabinet and asked for lawmakers to help him restore the public's trust in institutions damaged by the political crisis</s>Peru’s public prosecutor Marcial Paucar arrives at former President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s home, during a raid by the prosecution investigating money laundering, linked to the Odebrecht company in Lima, Peru, March 24, 2018. — Reuters picLIMA, March 25 — Authorities in Peru raided two houses owned by former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski as part of a money laundering probe, the public prosecutor’s office said yesterday.

Both homes are in Lima, the office announced on Twitter.

Television images showed officials entering the properties with boxes, a day after Congress accepted Kuczynski’s resignation.

In another development, Kuczynski’s defense team said it accepted a request from the prosecutor’s office to ban the ex-president from leaving the country.

He later tweeted that he was happy to cooperate with the investigation and would “clear my name and honor.”

He added he was a victim of political persecution and the media spectacle would damage the country’s image abroad.

The former Wall Street banker, 79, is under investigation over bribes he allegedly accepted from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht to secure public works contracts.

The bribes were allegedly paid to consulting companies linked to Kuczynski when he was finance minister under President Alejandro Toledo, who governed from 2001 to 2006.

Toledo is himself accused of receiving US$20 million in kickbacks in return for awarding the Brazilian construction giant a contract to build a road in the Amazon.

Kuczynski offered his resignation Wednesday, a day before Congress was due to vote on impeaching him for lying about his ties with Odebrecht.

He had denied all links with the company until it revealed it issued the bribes in exchange for contracts in December.

On Friday, new President Martin Vizcarra, Kuczynski’s vice president, was sworn in to replace him. — AFP</s>Authorities in Peru raided two houses owned by former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski as part of a money laundering probe, the public prosecutor's office said on Saturday.

Both homes are in Lima, the office announced on Twitter.

Television images showed officials entering the properties with boxes, a day after Congress accepted Kuczynski's resignation.

In another development, Kuczynski's defense team said it accepted a request from the prosecutor's office to ban the ex-president from leaving the country.

The former Wall Street banker, 79, is under investigation over bribes he allegedly accepted from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht to secure public works contracts.

The bribes were allegedly paid to consulting companies linked to Kuczynski when he was finance minister under President Alejandro Toledo, who governed from 2001 to 2006.

Toledo is himself accused of receiving $20 million in kickbacks in return for awarding the Brazilian construction giant a contract to build a road in the Amazon.

Kuczynski offered his resignation Wednesday, a day before Congress was due to vote on impeaching him for lying about his ties with Odebrecht.

He had denied all links with the company until it revealed it issued the bribes in exchange for contracts in December.

On Friday, new President Martin Vizcarra, Kuczynski's vice president, was sworn in to replace him.</s>He was in power for just 20 months

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Peru’s congress voted Friday to accept President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s resignation, paving the way for his replacement by a politician who most voters never even heard of until recently.

By a vote of 105-12, congress granted Kuczynski’s request to step down after just 20 months in power, but rejected his written arguments that he was doing so as a result of his opponents’ constant plotting to undermine his rule.

Congress’ action cleared the way for Vice President Martin Vizcarra to be sworn in later Friday.

Vizcarra received something of a hero*s welcome shortly after midnight Friday when he arrived to Peru from Canada, where he had been serving as ambassador, amid one of the most politically turbulent periods in Peru’s recent history.

Supporters welcomed him at the airport with a large cake in the red and white colors of Peru’s flag celebrating his 55th birthday Thursday. A marching band was on hand and some people carried signs reading “Peru is with Vizcarra.”

“With faith and optimism, Peru will always move forward,” he said in brief remarks from his home.

A last-minute hitch Friday had threatened to delay the transition of power.

Kuczynski said in a tweet that the proposed language of a congressional resolution approving his resignation is “unacceptable,” and if lawmakers press forward with the wording he would reverse his decision to quit, forcing congress to go forward with plans to try and impeach him.

In the end, the language was removed. But congress nonetheless rebuked the 79-year-old Kuczynski, scolding him for a “political crisis that that is the result of wrongful acts that the president himself has committed,” according to the final text of the resolution.

Efforts to oust the unpopular Kuczynski led by the daughter of former strongman Alberto Fujimori have been building for months. But the campaign went into overdrive this week after the emergence of secretly shot videos showed allies of Kuczynski, including Fujimori’s son, allegedly attempting to buy the support of an opposition lawmaker to block the president’s impeachment.

To stem off an even more disgraceful exit, Kuczynski delivered a resignation letter to congress Wednesday, blaming relentless attacks by his opponents for making it impossible to govern.

Kuczynski’s downfall was his association with Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction giant that has admitted to spreading some $800 million in bribes to officials across Latin America, including $29 million in Peru.

For months, even as three of his predecessors became ensnared in the bribery scandal, Kuczynski vehemently denied having any business or political ties to the company. But documents presented by Keiko Fujimori’s Popular Force party showed his consulting firm had received $782,000 in payments from Odebrecht a decade ago, some of them when he was a government minister.

The former Wall Street investor said he wasn’t then managing the day-to-day affairs of his consulting business and denied any wrongdoing.

Stepping into the void left by Kuczynski is Vizcarra, whose name wasn’t recognized by 81 percent of Peruvians in a March poll by Ipsos. His only previous experience in public office before becoming vice president in 2016 was as governor of Peru’s second-least populated province.

While Vizcarra is expected to continue Kuczynski’s pro-business agenda, he will face a tough challenge building consensus with a hostile congress and growing public anger at Peru’s political class. Protesters scuffled with police Thursday night while calling for new elections for both president and congress.

The new president’s first test on the international stage will come in three weeks when he is expected to host President Donald Trump and other Western Hemisphere leaders at the Summit of the Americas in Lima.</s>(LIMA, Peru) — Embattled President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski offered his resignation Wednesday ahead of an impeachment vote, seeking to put an end to a fast-moving political drama playing out just three weeks before the Andean nation is set to host U.S. President Donald Trump for a regional summit.

In a nationwide televised address, Kuczynski, flanked by his cabinet, lashed out at opponents led by the daughter of former strongman Alberto Fujimori for allegedly plotting his overthrow with damaging leaks of confidential documents that raised doubts about his integrity and made it impossible to govern.

“I don’t want to be an obstacle blocking our nation from finding the path to unity and harmony that it so much needs and which I was denied,” he said, adding that the campaign in favor of his removal had caused “enormous damage” to Peru’s democracy.

Congress was scheduled to debate Thursday on whether to accept the resignation, which would transfer power to First Vice President Martin Vizcarra. It could also decide to reject his offer and plow ahead with impeachment proceedings, which a large majority of lawmakers had favored before Kuczynski resigned.

Beyond the conservative leader’s departure, the outlook is uncertain, with many Peruvians expressing disgust with their entire political class — not just Kuczynski but also his accusers, led by Fujimori’s daughter Keiko.

Vizcarra, who is in Canada, where he had been serving as Peru’s ambassador, hasn’t said whether he would form a government to try and finish Kuczynski’s term ending in 2021. If he and the country’s second vice president resign in solidarity with Kuczynski, as they vowed during a previous impeachment attempt in December, power would transfer to the head of congress, who would be required by the constitution to call new elections— for both president and congress — within a year.

“The only public institution with moral authority left in Peru is the fire department,” said Oscar Mendoza, a lawyer standing outside the presidential palace moments after Kuczynski waved goodbye to aides and stepped into a tinted SUV for a lonely drive to his Lima mansion. “All the rest, when you touch them with your finger, puss comes out because they are fully corrupted by graft.”

Pressure has been building on Kuczynski to resign after the shock revelation Tuesday of secretly shot videos in which several of the president’s allies were caught allegedly trying to buy the support of an opposition lawmaker to block the conservative leader’s impeachment.

The videos presented by Keiko Fujimori’s party purportedly show attempts by Kuczynski’s lawyer, a government official, and Fujimori’s son Kenji trying to convince the lawmaker to back the president in exchange for a hand in lucrative state contracts.

Kuczynski said the videos had been heavily edited to smear him and recalled practices from “sad days of Peru’s history that we thought had been overcome.”

He was referring to Fujimori’s longtime spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, who secretly recorded himself paying cash bribes to media moguls, military officers and politicians in efforts to gain leverage over potential rivals and boost his almost unlimited power.

Kenji Fujimori led a group of rebellious lawmakers in December who defied his sister’s leadership of the Popular Force party to narrowly block Kuczynski’s removal. Days later, Kuczynski pardoned the feuding siblings’ father from a 25-year jail sentence for human rights abuses committed during his decade-long presidency.

A new impeachment vote had been scheduled to take place Thursday and Kuczynski had been scrambling for support.

Keiko Fujimori, who has publicly distanced herself from her father, had accused Kuczynski of orchestrating the alleged vote-buying scheme.

The videos released Tuesday portray the president’s allies trying to lure lawmaker Moises Mamani to their side with promises of lucrative contracts.

In one exchange, Freddy Aragon, the head of the government agency regulating firearms, tells Mamani that he stands to pocket 5 percent of future public works projects authorized by the executive branch in his district. In another, Kuczynski’s lawyer hands the waffling lawmaker the transportation minister’s cell phone.

“Those who’ve voted in favor of impeachment have all the doors closed to them,” Kenji Fujimori tells Mamani in one of the recordings.

Peru’s chief prosecutor as well as congress said they would open a criminal probe into the videos.

Kuczynski is accused of lying as president about $782,000 in payments his consulting firm received a decade earlier from Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht.

Odebrecht is at the center of Latin America’s biggest graft scandal, having admitted to paying some $800 million in bribes to officials across Latin America, including $29 million to politicians in Peru.</s>Disgraced former Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who resigned last week in the face of impending impeachment, has been banned from leaving the country while the corruption investigation against him continues.

Judge Juan Carlos Sanchez, a member of the Specialized System for Crimes of Corruption, approved the 18-month international travel ban to allow a probe into PPK’s alleged links with Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht to proceed.

The request for the ban, made by the Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office, was announced on Saturday after a session held at the Third Preparatory Investigation Court and chaired by Sanchez.

“The legal argument is well founded to impede Citizen Pedro Pablo Kuczynski from exiting the country,” the order said.

The ex-president’s lawyer, Cesar Nakazaki, said Kuczynski would abide by the order and cooperate with the investigation.

At the same time, three properties belonging to the former president in the districts of San Isidro and Cieneguilla in Lima were searched as part of an ongoing investigation into allegations of money laundering.

Both measures were supported by prosecutor Hamilton Castro, who is investigating transfers of more than US$1.4 million from Odebrecht to the Westfield company, owned by Kuczynski between 2005 and 2007.

On March 21, Kuczynski announced his resignation after the broadcast of several videos in which his allies were seen buying Congressional votes to avoid an impeachment motion against him.

Peru’s Congress accepted the resignation on Friday and swore in former Vice-President Martin Vizcarra as the new head of state.
Peruvian ex-President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski's homes are raided by police investigating Operation Car Wash. A judge orders him to remain in Peru.