Ecuador's National Court on Friday convicted former President Lenín Moreno of bribery, sentencing the 73-year-old to five years in prison over a sprawling kickback scheme tied to a Chinese-built hydroelectric dam — a ruling that closes a years-long saga but sends the ex-leader home, not to a cell.

Moreno won't actually see the inside of a prison. Because he is paraplegic and uses a wheelchair, the court ordered him to serve the sentence under house arrest, according to Al Jazeera. He was also permanently barred from holding public office.

The $76 Million Question

Prosecutors said Chinese state-owned construction giant Sinohydro funneled roughly $76.1 million in bribes — about 4 percent of the project's total cost — through fraudulent consulting contracts and shell companies between 2009 and 2018, in exchange for winning the contract to build the $2 billion Coca Codo Sinclair dam. Moreno is accused of personally pocketing more than $1 million of that money while serving as vice president under Rafael Correa from 2007 to 2013, years before he became president himself in 2017.

He wasn't alone in the dock. Twenty people were convicted in total, including Moreno's wife, daughter, two brothers and a brother-in-law, each handed roughly 30-month sentences as accomplices, and China's former ambassador to Quito, Cai Runguo, who also got five years, per the Associated Press. The court additionally ordered everyone convicted to repay triple the illicit gains within 90 days.

The dam itself has been dogged by problems since it opened in 2016, plagued by cracks and structural issues that have repeatedly forced it offline — an ironic footnote to a project prosecutors say was never won on merit.

"I have never received a single cent from Sinohydro," Moreno told the court, accusing his former ally-turned-rival Correa of engineering the case as revenge.

Moreno had returned to Ecuador from Paraguay, where he has lived since leaving office, to face trial. He immediately announced plans to appeal, which will send the case to a different panel of judges within the same National Court. Correa himself, convicted of corruption in a separate case, has been living in exile in Belgium and was not part of Friday's ruling.

The verdict makes Moreno the latest in a string of Ecuadorian leaders — including his own former running mate, Jorge Glas, who served time on corruption charges — to be convicted after leaving power, underscoring the deep rot investigators say has run through the country's infrastructure contracting for over a decade. Judge Manuel Cabrera, reading the verdict, said Moreno's conduct was "consistent with the charges brought by the prosecution: the crime of bribery attributed to a public official," according to Al Jazeera's report.

With an appeal now looming and repayment orders on the clock, the case is unlikely to close quietly — but for now, Ecuador has its answer on one of Latin America's longest-running dam-bribery scandals, even if the man at the center of it will be watching it play out from his own living room.