Kuwait’s Largest Money Laundering Lawsuit, The Malaysian Fund Case Comes to An End
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Kuwait’s criminal court has put an end to the largest money laundering case by ruling the family and its expatriates to 10 years in prison.
According to a report from Al Qabas newspaper, the court proceedings in Kuwait have sentenced a member of the ruling family, his partner, and two expatriates to 10 years imprisonment while the lawyer received a 7-year sentence, in the Malaysian Fund case, the largest money laundering case in the country’s history.
The court has ordered the Defendants to return $1 billion and face fines that total KD 145 million (equivalent to half a billion dollars). The public prosecution reopened the investigation after a two-year interruption due to a lack of information from international sources.
The investigations revealed nearly a billion dollars had been deposited into an influential Kuwaiti account before being transferred abroad. The main suspect of the case, the son of Kuwait’s former prime minister, and the other two defendants attended a previous session. Another defendant, Bashar Kiwan, the Syrian-French businessman, did not appear due to criminal rulings issued against him in absentia.
Police officer Nasser Al Tayyar, who was present in the session with his lawyer Amer Al Shahoumi, in an unprecedented move in Kuwaiti judiciary, claimed the civil temporary compensation of KD 5001 in his capacity as supervisor of the first inquiry team and director of the Anti-Money Laundering department. The prosecution accused three defendants of forming an organised criminal group that was involved in money laundering using Chinese currency equivalent to 343 million yuan (KD700,000), according to the stolen funds and investments of the Malaysian Sovereign Fund.
One of the defendants acquired this amount via his company’s bank accounts and his personal accounts at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China’s Kuwait branch, using a complex network of financial operations between his accounts and a company account in the Cayman Islands. Two other defendants were charged with money laundering totalling KD21 million, stolen from the investments of the Malaysian Sovereign Fund.
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