Former Government Minister Donville Inniss has lost the challenge against his conviction on money laundering charges in the United States.
Just months before the end of his two-year prison sentence for laundering bribe money through the US during his tenure as Minister of Industry, International Business, Commerce, and Small Business Development, the court dismissed his appeal.
The decision to affirm his conviction on one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and two counts of money laundering was handed down on Wednesday by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
The court was not moved by the arguments of the 56-year-old former politician, through his legal team, that there was insufficient evidence to convict him or that the judge in his trial gave faulty directions to the jury.
One of Inniss’ arguments was that the US government only proved that he received bribes from high-level executives of the Insurance Corporation of Barbados Ltd (ICBL), not that he laundered the proceeds of those bribes, and there was no evidence presented to the jury of any money laundering activity after receiving the bribes.
That US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which criminalises foreign bribery, does not permit prosecutors to charge foreign officials. They have therefore used money laundering laws to target corrupt foreign officials who move their money through the US.
The Appeals Court stated in a six-page summary order that “the government did not have to prove that Inniss, who was a legal permanent resident of the US at the time of the offence, laundered the proceeds of the bribes after receiving them to convict him….”
During the course of his trial, prosecutors said that Inniss, who had a residence in Tampa, Florida, concealed the bribes he got from ICBL by arranging to receive them through a friend’s dental company and a bank located in Elmont, New York. ICBL executives transferred the funds to the dental company using an invoice falsely claiming that the payments were for consulting services.
Inniss argued, in his appeal, that “the international transfer of funds did not promote the carrying on of specified unlawful activity”.
Rejecting that logic, the court stated: “The international transfers were integral to the success and essential to the completion of the scheme because they were necessary to move the bribe payments from ICBL to Inniss and for Inniss to profit from the scheme. We thus reject Inniss’s sufficiency of the evidence arguments.”
The Appeals Court also rejected the contention that the jury in Inniss’ trial in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York was misdirected by Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto.
“We are also unpersuaded by Inniss’s challenges to the jury instructions,” it said.
The court added that Inniss did not object to the jury instructions and it would therefore only be reviewing those instructions for plain error, which it did not find.
“We have considered the remainder of Inniss’s arguments and find them to be without merit. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the district court,” the Appeals Court added.
Inniss was found guilty in January 2020 of taking US$36 000 in bribes and laundering that money through US banks.
Federal prosecutors said that while overseeing the Barbados Investment and Development Corporation (BIDC) which maintained a portfolio of government-owned property, the former minister accepted the bribe payments in 2015 and 2016 so ICBL could get two insurance contracts to insure over US$100 million worth of government property.
The former St James South Member of Parliament is scheduled to be released from prison in January 2023. His sentence also included two years of supervised release.
Former ICBL executive Alex Tasker, meantime, remains in Barbados fighting extradition to the US to face trial for his alleged role in the money-laundering scheme.
It is alleged that between August 2015 and April 2016, he conspired with others to launder money in the US from outside the country, in violation of the law in that North American country. (DP)
