Fugees co-founding member Pras Michel has been sentenced to 14 years in jail for his involvement in a billion-dollar Malaysian cash laundering and overseas affect scheme.
Pras, 53, was discovered responsible in April 2023 on 10 federal counts, together with marketing campaign finance violations, cash laundering, unlawful lobbying, witness tampering, and mendacity to banks.
His sentence additionally contains three years of probation and he should forfeit greater than $64 million, in accordance with Billboard.
The case centered round Low Taek Jho, aka “Jho Low,” a fugitive businessman who was accused of embezzling $4.5 billion from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund often known as 1Malaysia Improvement Berhad. Michel allegedly labored on Jho’s behalf, deliberately failing to register below the Overseas Brokers Registration Act, and trying to affect two completely different presidential administrations, by pouring hundreds of thousands of {dollars} into Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection marketing campaign by means of straw donors, and by lobbying Donald Trump’s administration to halt a DOJ investigation into 1MDB. Michel was allegedly paid tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} for his providers.
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Michel purportedly rejected a deal that may have let him plead responsible to obstruction of justice and a lesser violation of the Overseas Brokers Registration Act. Below phrases of the deal, he would have spent as much as 16 months in prisons, and the federal government would have returned a portion of the hundreds of thousands of {dollars} seized from Michel’s accounts. Michel rebuffed the plea deal and demanded that each one of his seized cash be returned.
Michel’s high-profile trial included testimony from actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who mentioned how Low used a few of his embezzled fortune to finance Martin Scorsese’s 2013 movie, The Wolf of Wall Avenue, a part of a broader effort to win affect in Hollywood. Low additionally gave cash to DiCaprio’s environmental basis. The actor stated he ceased communications with Low in 2015, after discovering the unlawful sources of his cash.
On account of Michel’s authorized troubles, Fugees have been compelled to cancel a deliberate reunion tour in 2021. Whereas the group did play a handful of exhibits collectively in 2023, Michel later sued bandmate Ms. Lauryn Hill, accusing her of derailing a deliberate tour in 2024.
