Former BVI premier sentenced to 11 years in prison for cocaine-trafficking conspiracy.
06/09/2024
A U.S. court has sentenced a British Virgin Islands leader, who pledged to clean up the Caribbean archipelago’s reputation as a tax haven, to more than a decade in prison for cocaine trafficking and money laundering conspiracies.
Earlier this year, the former BVI premier and finance minister, Andrew Alturo Fahie, was convicted at trial of
- Agreeing to facilitate the safe passage of thousands of kilograms of Colombian cocaine through BVI ports en route to Miami.
- He was sentenced in Florida last week to 135 months in prison.
Fahie was arrested in April 2022 by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration after its agents pretended to be members of the Sinaloa cartel — once run by the notorious Mexican drug lord El Chapo — to lure Fahie to the United States, where he agreed to the fake smuggling scheme.
According to evidence introduced at Fahie’s trial, during March and April 2022, Fahie, a BVI ports official and the official’s son participated in a series of meetings with the purported Sinaloa Cartel drug trafficker to broker the arrangement.
Fahie and the two others “agreed to secure licenses, shield the cocaine-filled boats while in BVI’s ports, and grease the palms of BVI government officials and employees,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Florida.
The group discussed bringing 3,000 kilograms of cocaine through a BVI port as a test run, U.S. authorities said, followed by 3,000 kilograms once or twice a month for four months. In exchange, Fahie and the port director would get a percentage of the millions of dollars in cocaine sales.
SOURCE
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