The former president of El Salvador Mauricio Funes (2009-2014) was sentenced to eight years in prison for money laundering in a case that involves the delivery of a small plane as a gift, the Attorney General’s Office reported this Wednesday (06/26/2024). (FGR).
Funes was tried and sentenced in absentia, after a legal reform that enables trials without the presence of the accused. The former ruler has lived in Nicaragua since 2016 and received the nationality of that country.
The Prosecutor’s Office indicated that, in the sentence issued by the Fifth Sentencing Court of San Salvador, “It was shown that Funes favored a Guatemalan company to be awarded the construction of the San Isidro bridge over the Lempa River.”
He added that the former president – the first to come to power at the hands of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) – “received a small plane as a gift.”
This is not the first sentence that Funes has received, given that in May 2022 he was sentenced to 14 years in prison for crimes committed within the framework of a truce between gangs during his Government, while in July 2023 he received another sentence of 6 years in prison for the crime of tax fraud.
The former journalist was also convicted in civil matters and also has other criminal cases open for accusations of embezzlement of more than 351 million in state funds and also for acts of corruption in the construction of a dam.
The cases of corruption attributed to Funes and former president Salvador Sánchez Cerén (2014-2019), also from the FMLN, have led this political formation to decline and it currently does not have any representation in Congress nor does it govern any of the 262 districts of the FMLN. Central American country.
