use Net::SFTP::Foreign;

# BTW, setting your locale correctly would probably
# make these "encode" operations unnecessary!
my %args = (user => encode("iso-8859-1", $ftp_user),
            password => encode("iso-8859-1", $ftp_passwd),
            fs_encoding => "iso-8591-1");
$args{port} = encode("iso-8859-1", $ftp_port) if defined $ftp_port;
$sftp = Net::SFTP::Foreign->new($ftp_url);
$sftp->error and die "unable to connect ro remote host: " . $sftp->error;

$sftp->mget($ftp_file, $local,
             on_error => sub { warn "error: " . $_[0]->error });