Imprisonments upheld, fines amended in major money-laundering case

TDT | Manama

The Court of Cassation has ruled to uphold the five-year jail sentences of three officials from Bahrain-based Future Bank and amend the prescribed fines to BD1 million each for their involvement in a major money-laundering case.

This is according to Chief Prosecutor Mohammed Jamal Sultan, who said yesterday that the Kingdom’s supreme court of appeal had issued its judgments in five cases of money-laundering involving the three Future Bank officials, along with Future Bank and three Iranian banks, our sister paper Al Ayam reported.

Each of the banks involved in the case has also been fined BD1 million, while an amount of $80,000 has been confiscated, which is the total of the remittances made in the money-laundering operations. Previously, the Public Prosecution had announced that its investigations revealed a scheme that enabled various Iranian-backed entities—including those involved in terrorist financing or those subject to international sanctions—in the running of international transactions while avoiding regulatory scrutiny.

It had been found that Future Bank, which is operating in Bahrain under the supervision of Bank Melli Iran and the Export Development Bank of Iran, had carried out thousands of international financial transactions, while providing covers for the Iranian entities there through deliberate concealment or removal of basic information while remitting money via the SWIFT network.

The Public Prosecution investigated the matter and referred the Future Bank officials and the other implicated banks to the court for trial, as per the anti-money laundering and combatting funding terrorism law. Sultan added yesterday that the Public Prosecution is still continuing with its investigations with other related issues, in preparation for referring these cases for criminal trial.