Appellate Court Allows Montesinos Tipster to Sue Peru for Reward

On November 1, 2006, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decided that the Peruvian government could not assert sovereign immunity against José Guevara in his suit to recover a reward for tipping off Peruvian officials about the hiding place of Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos Torres, former advisor to Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori and head of Peru’s National Intelligence System during the 1990s. The court’s decision overturned a district court ruling that a foreign state’s offer of a reward in return for information enabling it to locate and capture a fugitive does not fall within the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act’s commercial activity exception to sovereign immunity...[more]