A US court has sentenced rapper Prakazrel ‘Pras’ Michel to 14 years in prison for involvement in a billion-dollar Malaysia scam that funnelled money into American politics, his lawyer confirmed.<\/p>\n
In 2023, the 53-year-old founding member of the 1990s hit trio the Fugees was convicted of money laundering and campaign finance violations in a global foreign influence scandal led by Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho.<\/p>\n
The scheme funnelled millions of dollars into former US president Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.<\/p>\n
A jury had found Michel guilty on 10 criminal counts following a trial that included Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio as a witness.<\/p>\n
In addition, Michel was found guilty of conspiracy, forgery, and acting as an undisclosed agent of a foreign government.<\/p>\n
He was also tried for illegal lobbying on behalf of China in 2017, during the first Trump administration.<\/p>\n
He intended to request the extradition to Beijing of entrepreneur Guo Wengui, accused of defrauding thousands of investors to the sum of over $1 billion dollars.<\/p>\n
Michel’s attorney, Peter Zeidenberg, said his client would appeal and that the sentence was lop-sided.<\/p>\n
“It is true that Mr. Michel was sentenced to 168 months,” Mr Zeidenberg said following yesterday’s sentencing.<\/p>\n
“We believe the verdict was unsupported by the evidence and that the sentence is completely disproportional to the facts alleged, particularly when compared to his codefendants.”<\/p>\n
Mr Zeidenberg was referring to others implicated in the case: Elliott Broidy, a former leading fundraiser for Donald Trump before his first presidency; George Higginbotham, a former US Department of Justice official; and Nickie Lum Davis, an American international businesswoman from Hawaii.<\/p>\n
“Elliott Broidy was pardoned, George Higginbotham got 3 months’ probation, and Nicki Lum Davis received 24 months,” Mr Zeidenberg said in an email.<\/p>\n
“There simply is no justification for Mr Michel being singled out like this except for the penalty for opting for trial.”<\/p>\n
Michel ‘betrayed his country for money’ – prosecutors<\/p>\n
Justice Department prosecutors said last year that Michel had “betrayed his country for money” and “funneled millions of dollars in prohibited foreign contributions into a United States presidential election,” warranting a serious sentence.<\/p>\n
In the early 2010s, Low – now a fugitive believed to be hiding in China – used billions of dollars stolen from a Malaysian state investment fund known as 1MDB to invest in luxury US real estate, fine art and Hollywood films like DiCaprio’s Wolf of Wall Street.<\/p>\n
The exposure of the 1MDB scandal brought about the downfall of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s government in 2018 and his later conviction and imprisonment.<\/p>\n
Michel was accused of helping Low secretly channel money into then-president Obama’s 2012 campaign via shell companies, hiding the donations’ origins.<\/p>\n
Michel, originally from Brooklyn and a Haitian-American, founded the Fugees with his childhood friends Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean.<\/p>\n
The group won two Grammy Awards at the peak of their fame in the 1990s and sold tens of millions of albums.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A US court has sentenced rapper Prakazrel ‘Pras’ Michel to 14 years in prison for involvement in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-152411","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}