NEW YORK — A suspected financier of the Lebanese Shia terror group Hezbollah was subpoenaed to appear in federal court in New York on Wednesday.
Mohammad Bazzi is accused of having paid millions of dollars to the terrorist organization. The US Department of Justice called him a “key financier” of the organization.
He was arrested in Romania and charged in the United States in February, where he was extradited to on Tuesday.
In 2018, the US Treasury listed Bazzi as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” for aiding, sponsoring and providing financial, material and technological support and financial services to Hezbollah, the US attorney’s office said.
The United States had offered a $10 million reward for information on his whereabouts.
Bazzi, 58, was charged with three counts related to financing a terrorist group and money laundering. Each count carries a 20-year prison sentence.
He reportedly provided Hezbollah with millions of dollars earned through business activities in Belgium, Lebanon, Iraq and West Africa. Bazzi is a Lebanese and Belgian citizen. The reason why he traveled to Romania before his arrest is still unclear.
Bazzi and another defendant in the case, Talal Chahine, allegedly started a scheme in 2007 using a restaurant chain in Michigan to conceal their assets.
Bazzi was designated as a supporter of terrorism in 2018 and was prohibited from accessing his US assets or doing business with US entities.
He and Chahine then allegedly conspired to force someone in the United States to liquidate real estate linked to the restaurant chain and secretly transfer the funds to Lebanon in order to evade sanctions.
The defendants allegedly discussed concealing the transaction from U.S. authorities in a number of ways, including making false purchases of restaurant equipment from a Chinese company, inventing a fictitious loan to a family in Kuwait, simulating a real estate transaction in Beirut or by creating a fake franchise contract for the opening of a chain of Lebanese restaurants in the United States.
In 2019, Bazzi and Chahine decided to fraudulently transfer around $860,000 to Lebanon for the fictitious restaurant chain, according to the indictment.
The defendants continued to communicate about the illegal dealings with individuals in the United States until early this year, investigators said.
US law enforcement authorities said Bazzi and Chahine were caught in taped conversations offering different methods to conceal the illegal transactions from US authorities.
The case is being heard in federal court for the Eastern District of New York. Some of Bazzi’s and Chahine’s communications and correspondence went through the court’s jurisdiction.
Romanian authorities took Bazzi into custody in February after he arrived in Bucharest.
2023-04-27 08:22:47
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