LIMA: A key witness in the corruption case of a former mayor of Lima has been found dead at his home, Peruvian prosecutors said, less than three months before the trial is due to start.
Jose Miguel Castro, who was a Lima municipality official during ex-mayor Susana Villaran’s term from 2011-2014, was found dead Sunday morning at his home in the capital, where he was under house arrest.
The cause of his death was not immediately known.
Castro was cooperating with state prosecutors investigating Villaran, who is accused of receiving millions of dollars in bribes from Brazilian construction firms Odebrecht and OAS.
“He was the second most important person behind Ms Villaran,“ prosecutor Jose Domingo Perez told television news channel Canal N.
“We were expecting his valuable contribution” to the trial, he added.
Castro was a co-defendent alongside Villaran, whose trial is set to begin on September 23.
In 2022, prosecutors requested a 29-year prison sentence for the 75-year-old former mayor.
Villaran was accused of collusion, money laundering and forming a criminal organization that received more than $10 million in illicit contributions from Odebrecht — now called Novonor — and OAS, as well as other crimes.
The leftist former mayor has been on probation since May 2021 after spending a year in pretrial detention.
In 2019, Villaran admitted that the Brazilian companies had financed a 2013 campaign against opposition efforts to oust her from office, but said the payment was only $4 million.
Former Odebrecht chief in Peru, Jorge Barata, who struck a cooperation deal with prosecutors, told them his company financed Villaran’s campaign, fearing its municipal contracts would be jeopardized if she were removed in the recall vote.
For more than a decade, Odebrecht distributed $788 million across a dozen Latin American countries to win government contracts, according to the US Department of Justice.
The scandal imprisoned dozens of Latin American political and business leaders.
Odebrecht admitted to US authorities in 2016 that it paid $29 million in bribes in Peru between 2005 and 2014.
