Former Guatemalan Vice President, Roxana Baldetti was on Tuesday sentenced to more than 15 years in prison over his involvement in a fraudulent state contract to decontaminate a major lake in the country.

Backed by a United Nation’s anti-corruption commission, the prosecutors accused Baldetti and 12 other persons of conspiring to grant an $18 million contract to clean up Lake Amatitlan to an Israel-based company, M. Tarcic Engineering Ltd.

The company had said it had a special formula that could clean the lake within months but investigators discovered that the company used a substance that was merely water, salt and chlorine.

Reading the sentence, Judge Pablo Xitumul sentenced the 55-year-old Baldetti to 15 years and 6 months in prison for illegal association, fraud and influence trafficking, describing her as the “the big chief” behind the fraud.

Representative of the Israeli company, Uri Roitman was sentenced to 11 years for fraud and illegal association.

Baldetti, who has consistently denied any wrongdoing, resigned from the vice presidency in 2015 while facing corruption charges in a separate case while former President Otto Perez Molina was forced to step down shortly afterwards and remains in jail awaiting trial.

A Guatemalan court last year approved a request to extradite Baldetti, who is also facing drug trafficking charges in the United States after several cases in Guatemala were resolved.

The US federal court indictment alleges that Baldetti and others conspired to traffic cocaine to the country between 2010 and 2015.

Tuesday’s sentence is seen as an example of how the UN-backed anti-corruption commission has been able to help prosecutors reach the previously untouchable upper echelons of Guatemala’s government.

President Jimmy Morales last month railed against the commission during a speech at the United Nations and has banned the commission’s chief, Ivan Velasquez, from re-entering the country.