New York, United States | AFP | The Brooklyn federal judge, Marcia Henry, denied on Tuesday the granting of bail to Luis Enrique Martinelli Linares, son of former President Ricardo Martinelli, extradited to the United States to answer the money laundering accusations in the framework of the Odebrecht case.
Henry took into account the risk that he might flee the country given his Panamanian and Italian nationalities and his family’s fortune, while he rejected the defense’s offer to pay up to five million dollars in bail. “Three or five million dollars is just a drop in the ocean,” the judge said at the end of a teleconference hearing.
Defense of the 39-year-old Martinelli first proposed posting a $ 3 million bond “with the help of friends and family,” to obtain his parole before raising the stakes to $ 5 million.
But the prosecution recalled the “extraordinary efforts” that Martinelli had made to “avoid” having to respond to the US courts for accusations of laundering millions of dollars in bribes, through bank accounts in New York and elsewhere.
The US justice accuses Luis Enrique Martinelli and his brother Ricardo Alberto, 42, detained in Guatemala awaiting extradition to the United States, of receiving around $ 28 million from the Brazilian company Odebrecht, of which some 19 million passed through US accounts before ending up on others, mainly in Switzerland.
The Martinelli brothers were detained on July 6, 2020 at Guatemala’s international airport when they were stopping off on a private flight that intended to take them to Panama.
