Peruvian former President Alejandro Toledo has been convicted of taking bribes from Brazilian construction company Odebrecht and was sentenced to 20 years and six months in prison on Monday. The verdict marks Peru’s first high-profile conviction related to Brazil’s continent-spanning Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) corruption investigation. Toledo, a 78-year-old economist who holds a doctorate from Stanford University, governed the Andean nation between 2001 and 2006. He was convicted of taking $35m in bribes from the company formerly known as Odebrecht, according to prosecutors, in exchange for letting it win a contract to build the road that now connects Peru’s southern coast with an Amazonian area in western Brazil. Odebrecht, now known as Novonor, was at the centre of Latin America’s largest graft scandal, after admitting in 2016 that it had bribed officials in a dozen countries to secure public works contracts. During the year-long trial, Toledo denied the money-laundering and collusion charges. On Monday he frequently smirked, and at times laughed, particularly when the judge mentioned multimillion-dollar sums central to the case as well as when she struggled to read transcripts and other evidence in the case. However last week he asked the court with a broken voice and the palms of his hands together to let him return home citing his age, cancer and heart problems. “Please let me heal or die at home,” he said. Judge Inés Rojas said Toledo’s victims were Peruvians who “trusted” him as their president. Rojas explained that in that role, Toledo was “in charge of managing public finances” and responsible for “protecting and ensuring the correct” use of resources. Instead, she said, he “defrauded the state.” The sentence was announced in a room set up in a small Lima prison where Toledo has been detained since last year and which was built specifically to house former Peruvian presidents. Former president Alberto Fujimori, who died in September, served time there and ex-president Pedro Castillo is also being held there as he faces allegations of “rebellion” after trying to dissolve Congress in 2022. Two other ex-presidents, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Ollanta Humala, are also being investigated in the Odebrecht case. Toledo, who famously shined shoes as a child, was arrested in the US in 2019 after officials in Peru requested his extradition. Prosecutors relied on testimony from former Odebrecht executive Jorge Barata as well as Toledo’s ex-collaborator Josef Maiman, who said Toledo received bribes. The former president signed the contract with Odebrecht for the construction of the road, though the building took place over two subsequent administrations.