An American couple was sentenced to seven years in prison for laundering BD470,000 of revenue which was meant to be disbursed to shareholders in China, ruled the High Criminal Court.
The businessman and his wife are unlikely to face justice, however, since they had fled the country before their fraud was detected by the authorities, making the ruling an in-absentia verdict.
The 58-year-old man and 59-year-old woman were previously convicted of swindling the aforementioned revenue, and were tried for laundering the same embezzled money in this trial.
Judges fined them BD100,000 each, ordered them to return the laundered amount of BD468,831 to victims, which will be confiscated from their property and possessions equal to the amount.
The couple was convicted of attempting to give legitimacy to money that they unrightfully took from the accounts of a venture they co-owned with Chinese investors.
The Lower Criminal Court earlier convicted the couple of embezzling money entrusted to them by withholding the profits from the investors – instead, transferring the BD468,831 to bank accounts belonging to their own businesses.
They had been sentenced to a year in prison each, but the ruling was also made in absentia as they had left the country in June 2022 and have not returned since. They were neither arrested nor brought to trial in Bahrain, despite being wanted by Interpol.
The two companies – one specialised in electronics and the other in real estate – stood trial alongside them as co-defendants in the current court case, charged as an ‘artificial person’.
The two registered business entities were fined BD100,000 each for being used to execute the heist, having been exploited by the American defendants, who were their owners and signatories.
One of the companies has since been liquidated, according to commercial registration (CR) portal Sijilat, and another has been deactivated since the CR was not renewed.
The GDN earlier reported that the ‘victim’ company, a large Chinese corporation specialised in manufacturing electric cables, had entrusted the American defendant to open a branch in Bahrain. Instead, the couple embezzled them and attempted to conceal the origin of their funds, to make them appear as legitimate, by transferring amounts into their personal and joint bank accounts.
They then reportedly distributed the money through various banks, before ultimately sending the money abroad, wiring it to bank accounts in the US and Greece under their names, as well as to India. Prosecutors stated that they withdrew part of the money and used it on purchases and payments while they were still in Bahrain.
“The laundered funds were intermittently mixed in with additional money that does not appear to be of illicit origin, but it was folded in and combined with money involved in the crime, to make it harder to track, and to legitimise the stolen amounts,” the judges ruled,
Court documents state that the Bahrain Chamber for Dispute Resolution (BCDR) earlier ruled that the defendants must return BD468,831 to the Chinese company.
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