BOGOTA: Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe will be sentenced on Friday to 12 years of house arrest for abuse of process and bribery of a public official, according to a document seen by Reuters and a source with knowledge of the matter.

Uribe was convicted of the two charges on Monday by Judge Sandra Liliana Heredia in a witness-tampering case that has run for about 13 years. He has always maintained his innocence.

The information, also published by local media, came hours ahead of the hearing where Heredia will read the sentence in court.

Uribe will be fined $578,000 in the case, the document showed.

The conviction made him the country’s first ex-president to ever be found guilty at trial and came less than a year before Colombia’s 2026 presidential election, in which several of Uribe’s allies and proteges are competing for top office.

It could also have implications for Colombia’s relationship with the US: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week Uribe’s conviction is a “weaponization of Colombia’s judicial branch by radical judges” and analysts have said there could be cuts to US aid in response.

Uribe, 73, and his supporters have always said the process is a persecution, while his detractors have celebrated it as deserved comeuppance for a man who has been accused for decades of close ties with violent right-wing paramilitaries but never convicted of any crime until now.

SARAJEVO: The separatist president of the Serb part of Bosnia vowed to defy a court ruling banning him from political office for six years on Friday and said he would seek help from both Russia and US President Donald Trump.

Milorad Dodik was responding to a ruling by Bosnia’s appeals court upholding a sentence handed down to him for defying the orders of the international peace envoy, whose role is to prevent multi-ethnic Bosnia sliding back into civil war.

Dodik told reporters he would continue to go to work.

“I do not accept the verdict,” he told reporters. “I will seek help from Russia and I will write a letter to the US administration.”

He said he would ask his associates not to communicate with ambassadors from the European Union, which has a peacekeeping force in Bosnia to ensure stability that has deployed reserve forces over the crisis.

The sentence, handed down to Dodik in February for defying the Constitutional Court as well as the peace envoy, included a one-year prison term that under Bosnia’s legal system can possibly be exchanged for a fine.

His lawyer Goran Bubic said his team would appeal Friday’s appeals court ruling to the Constitutional Court and seek a temporary delay of the implementation of the verdict pending its decision.

Dodik’s conviction in February sparked uproar in Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic, triggering Bosnia’s worst political crisis since the conflict, which killed around 100,000 people in 1992-5.

A pro-Russian nationalist who seeks to split his region from Bosnia, Dodik responded with measures to reduce the state’s presence in the Serb Republic by ordering lawmakers to ban the state’s prosecutor, court, and intelligence agency.

The constitutional court then temporarily suspended the regional parliament’s legislation as endangering the constitutional and legal order and sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the formal name of the country.

Dodik is a long-time advocate of the secession of the Serb-dominated region, which along with the Bosniak-Croat Federation makes up Bosnia. The crisis precipitated by his separatist push represents one of the biggest threats to peace in the Balkans since the conflicts that followed Yugoslavia’s collapse.