LIMA, Peru — President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned from office on Wednesday amid a corruption scandal, just weeks before President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit the country for a major regional summit on improved governance in the Americas.

Kuczynski announced his resignation on television. He denied wrongdoing but said "I don't want to be an obstacle to our nation finding the unity and harmony that it so needs."

Kuczynski is one of the most prominent politicians to fall in a wave of investigations across Latin America into alleged corruption linked to a Brazilian construction firm, Odebrecht.

Kuczynski, 79, is a former Wall Street banker who held several top political jobs in Peru before assuming the presidency in 2016. Impeachment proceedings against him had been scheduled to start Thursday.

His position became untenable after new revelations regarding his lobbying for Odebrecht, which is at the center of Latin America's largest corruption scandal.

It has emerged that Kuczynski acknowledged before a closed-door congressional hearing last week one payment from an Odebrecht affiliate of nearly $700,000 in return for "verbal" products and "contacts." That payment took place before he became president but after he had served previously as prime minister and economy minister. Many here regard that as a blatant conflict of interest, and some are asking whether it may have constituted the crime of influence-peddling.

Separately, videos emerged on Tuesday of one of the president's few allies in Congress, Kenji Fujimori, appearing to offer kickbacks on public works to lawmakers in return for voting against impeaching Kuczynski.

The two developments appeared to have sent support for impeachment in the single-chamber, 130-member legislature surging past the two-thirds majority, or 87 votes, necessary to oust Kuczynski just 19 months into his five-year term.