A senior official from Kuwait’s oil sector has been referred to the Public Funds Prosecution for interrogation for allegedly embezzling money in the case of the Vietnam Refinery Project and money laundering.
Al-Rai quoting informed sources said, the Public Prosecution’s report on the case stated that the investigations found suspicious money transfers into the accounts of defendants whose names are linked to the main accused.
The money transfers are believed to be disproportionate to their sources of income, in addition to the inflation of their account balances during 2017.
The main suspect allegedly transferred the money from his bank account in Singapore to his bank account in Kuwait and then re-transferred the money into the bank accounts of a number of his family members, in addition to money transfers issued from a company account in the UAE to the account of one of the accused with the Kuwaiti Bank, which he then transferred to another defendant’s account in another bank, and the latter transferred the money to the main defendant’s account, which in turn he re-transferred the money to the accounts of a number of his family members.
The Public Prosecution had charged the main suspect with selling the refinery’s products in the Vietnamese spot market, deliberately not activating the concluded product purchase agreement in a way that harmed the interest of his employer.
The Public Prosecution concluded that the incident, when proven, constitutes the felony of intentional damage to public money.
The technical report on the incident showed that the failure to activate the purchase agreement caused damages to the company, represented by a difference between the actual sale in the spot market and the prices prevailing at that time in the regular markets, in addition to other losses amounting to about $15.8 million.
For his part, the prime suspect has denied the charges against him, saying that based on the decisions of the refinery’s board of directors, work was done not to obligate one of the companies to purchase the refinery’s products in the trial operation phase.