A Peruvian judge has ordered the return of 171 properties seized from the former Universidad Alas Peruanas (UAP), overturning a more than three-year-old court order after finding that the prosecutor who requested it failed to properly justify the measure.
Judge Eiser Jiménez Coronel directed that Peru's National Superintendence of Public Registries (Sunarp) and the National Program of Seized Assets (Pronabi) be notified of his decision to lift the seizure.
The seizure had originally been ordered on March 14 and April 5, 2023, by Víctor Zúñiga Urday, head of the Fourth National Preparatory Investigation Court.
The prosecutor then handling the case, Wilson Salazar Reque, had requested the raid and seizure of the properties on the grounds that they were allegedly acquired with funds of illicit origin. According to Salazar, during the tenure of former rector and general manager Fidel Ramírez Prado, Ramírez and members of his family embezzled money from UAP and used it to acquire several properties.
The university's defense countered that the Ramírez family, while they controlled UAP, committed fraud for their own benefit and in doing so harmed the Cooperativa de Servicios Múltiples, the cooperative that owns the university.
No grounds for the seizure
According to Judge Jiménez's ruling, prosecutor Salazar never demonstrated that the cooperative benefited from the mismanagement at the university under Ramírez. On the contrary, the judge found the cooperative was the one harmed.
In his resolution, dated August 12, 2026, the judge wrote that Universidad Alas Peruanas had not obtained any benefit from the fifteen acts of fraud attributed to it by the prosecution and was instead the main party affected. He said there was a clear inconsistency in the prosecutor's theory, since if the assets belonged to Universidad Alas Peruanas SA and the conduct described was carried out by Fidel Ramírez as general manager along with others, it made no sense to argue that the company itself had acted to defraud its own assets.
As an example, the judge noted that Ramírez concealed from the cooperative's members and from external auditors five contracts to rent out properties at inflated prices, signed with companies belonging to his nephew, Joaquín Ramírez Gamarra, worth 8.2 million soles. In each instance, Ramírez used funds the cooperative had allocated to UAP to carry out deals, without the cooperative's knowledge, with companies run by members of his own family.
Properties seized across the country
The seized properties were spread across Peru: 117 in Lima, 19 in Chiclayo, 13 in Trujillo and 7 in Piura.
An indefensible case
The judge concluded that since Universidad Alas Peruanas was the victim of fraud in the administration of a legal entity, that part of the prosecutor's request should have been declared inadmissible.
During the hearing, Judge Jiménez asked the representative of the Specialized Asset Laundering Prosecutor's Office to substantiate the grounds Salazar had used to request the seizure. She declined to do so, after repeatedly stating that she did not share the arguments put forward by Salazar.
The judge wrote that, when asked clarifying questions by the court, she said she was not in a position to substantiate some parts of the request, and that her comments in the hearing drew his attention because the provincial prosecutor appeared to be excusing her own lack of diligence by suggesting she had not been in charge of the case, implying instead that Salazar had been.
The judge argued that Salazar's central error was asserting that all of UAP's assets were the product of fraud. He found that an embezzlement scheme was indeed carried out by Fidel Ramírez in complicity with his family, but for their own benefit rather than that of the cooperative that owns the university.
