The first lady of Peru, Lilia Paredes, has gone to testify before the Congressional Oversight Commission, as she was demanded, to answer for the alleged crimes of usurpation of functions and influence peddling committed by her sister, Yenifer Paredes, although she has invoked her right not to testify.

“I totally abstain from testifying,” he has thus responded on several occasions to questions posed by opposition deputies, to whom he has reminded that he already gave a statement last July 8 before the Prosecutor’s Office. “They can ask for a copy, there are all the questions,” he concluded.

At the insistence of the commission, the wife of the president, Pedro Castillo, explained that his appearance was due to his “obligation to come to comply with this”, but on the recommendation of his lawyer, he refrains from testifying.

“The whole of Peru wants to listen to her, it does not want to listen to the recommendations given by her lawyer”, protested the ‘fujimorista’ deputy Nilza Chacon, as well as her fellow deputy, Arturo Alegria, who asked Paredes to listen to “the thousands of Peruvians who are waiting for an answer” and not to her lawyer.

In an hour and a half, Paredes has ventilated a proposed commission to answer for the case that his sister has open in the Prosecutor’s Office for alleged crimes of usurpation of functions, influence trafficking and aggravated collusion, after some images were made public in the Peruvian press in which she is allegedly offering public contracts without bidding.

In that video, Yenifer Paredes allegedly offered a sanitation project to the town of La Succha, district of San Miguel, in Cajamarca, region where Castillo is from. According to the images, she communicates to those who live there that she needs to census them because “the profile of her project is already approved”.

As a consequence of these images, a journalist from América TV, the same channel that published the report, denounced a week ago to have been kidnapped together with the cameraman by the peasant patrols when they tried to take a statement from the inhabitants of this region located in the northwest of Peru.

The network claims that the peasant patrols forced them to make a public apology to those who had been kidnapped, otherwise “their lives were at risk”. For this reason, they decided to interrupt the usual programming and give way by telephone to reporter Eduardo Quispe, who “obliged” to read a text dictated to him.

During the reading Quispe said that the report was “a false accusation”, for which it was necessary to rectify in order “not to harm the central government and their families” and to ask for forgiveness “at the national level for not acting in accordance with the truth”.