KUWAIT CITY, Feb 12: The Court of Cassation presided over by Judge Sultan Buresli rejected the petition to reconsider the ruling that sentenced 16 members of the Bnaider network gang to prison and imposed a fine of KD 4 million after they were convicted of money laundering and forgery. It ruled to imprison the defendants, including an Iranian expatriate, in the Bnaider Network case, after convicting them of money laundering and forging official documents.

The Court of Cassation overturned the ruling of the Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeals, which acquitted the defendants of money laundering, and decided to sentence 13 of them to ten years imprisonment, and the rest to five years imprisonment with hard labor, imposing a fine of a total of more than KD 4 million on all of them, and confiscate the cars, jewelry, and watches retrieved from the site of the incident. The court upheld the first-degree ruling to imprison the Iranian expatriate for 4 years for the crime of forging a vehicle license, bringing his total years of imprisonment to 14 years with hard work, followed by his deportation from the country.

It is worth highlighting that the Public Prosecution had accused the suspects of committing money laundering crimes, stressing that they had recycled the amounts seized from the Ports Authority fund. The defendants were a businessman and a Russian expatriate who were both sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labor. The Court of First Instance had acquitted the defendants of money laundering charges due to the lack of connection between them and the funds confiscated by the defendants. Therefore, it ruled that the Iranian suspect be imprisoned for only four years, a ruling that was upheld by the Court of Appeals.

However, the Court of Cassation canceled that acquittal. Earlier, the security services arrested an Iranian expatriate who owned a chalet in Bnaider. After confiscating his vehicles, they found large sums of money in the chalet. They also followed the movement of his bank accounts and discovered that they were linked to several businessmen, one of whom had previously been accused in the case of seizing the funds of the Ports Fund, to which the two social security institutions contribute.

By Jaber Al-Hamoud
Al-Seyassah/Arab Times Staff