KUALA LUMPUR (March 29): Fugitive financier Low Taek Jho, better known as Jho Low, has been sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment in absentia by a Kuwaiti court on money laundering charges.

According to Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas, a sheikh, his partner and a foreigner were also handed 10-year prison sentences, while a lawyer was sentenced to seven years in jail on money laundering charges in relation to a “Malaysian fund”.

According to the report, the group was ordered to return US$1 billion (RM4.4 billion), and fined 145 million Kuwaiti dinars (RM2 billion).

Al-Qabas said the Kuwaiti public prosecution charged the defendants as an “organised criminal group”, which laundered 343.7 million Kuwaiti dinars (US$1.1 billion or RM4.9 billion) knowing that it was embezzled from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.

Meanwhile, Sarawak Report on Tuesday (March 28) reported that the Kuwaiti courts had handed down a crushing guilty verdict against the once all-powerful son of a former prime minister, Sheikh Sabah Jaber Al-Mubarak Al-Hamad Al-Sabah.

It said the royal businessman had been sentenced to 10 years in jail for having cooperated with Jho Low, in laundering hundreds of millions of ringgit looted from Malaysia.

Sarawak Report said also convicted were Jho Low himself, the Sheikh’s personal lawyer, a college friend of Jho Low’s and continuing business partner, Hamad Al Wazan, and a former business associate of the Sheikh, Bachar Kiwan, who fled Kuwait at the time of the crime, having fallen foul of the criminal gang.