A court in Dhaka has sent Farah Diba, the wife of Destiny Group Managing Director Rafiqul Amin, to jail on Sunday.
Earlier, she surrendered to the court on Sunday following her conviction in a case over a Tk 18.61 billion scam, reports bdnews24.com.
Judge Sheikh Nazmul Alam sentenced all 46 people accused in the case to varying terms on May 12 for embezzlement and money laundering. They were also fined Tk 23 billion in total.
Rafiqul and six others were already in jail while the 39 others, including Diba, were absconding.
The court handed her an eight-year prison sentence and fined her Tk 400 million. Failure to pay the fine will increase the jail term by two years.
On Sunday, Diba sought bail from the court after her surrender. Judge Shaikh Nazmul Alam of the Fourth Special Judge's Court of Dhaka ordered her to jail, dismissing her plea for bail, said Mir Ahmed Ali Salam, a counsel for the Anti-Corruption Commission, which filed the case a decade ago.
Destiny President M Harun-Ar-Rashid, a former army chief, was sentenced to four years in prison, while the multi-level marketing company’s MD Rafiqul was handed 12 years in jail. Chairman Mohammad Hossain was handed down 10 years in jail. Harun received the shortest prison term among all the suspects because he was a freedom fighter.
The ACC filed two cases in 2012 -- one related to Destiny Multipurpose Cooperative Society and the other to Destiny Tree Plantation.
In 2014, the national graft-busting agency submitted charges in both cases, accusing 19 people in the Destiny Tree Plantation case, while 46 were accused in the Destiny Multipurpose Cooperative Society case.
The ACC found out that Destiny collected Tk 19.01 billion for the multipurpose cooperative project in 2008 and embezzled Tk 18.61 billion from there, causing losses to 850,000 investors.
Through the Destiny Tree Plantation project, the group had collected Tk 24.45 billion from investors since 2008 and embezzled around Tk 22.57 billion, according to the charges. More than 1.7 million investors fell victim to this misappropriation.
The cases also allege that the embezzled money was laundered.
The investigators said the accused deposited the money in the bank accounts of 28 units of Destiny Group and later transferred the funds to 722 accounts in 34 banks. All of them were frozen.
The judge ordered the confiscation of Destiny’s frozen assets and money deposited in banks.
It said the fines will be distributed among the shareholders and investors. The court formed a committee to oversee the compensation for the victims of the misappropriation.
