A Mauritanian court handed down a five-year prison sentence to the country’s former President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz after finding him guilty of money laundering and self-enrichment, his attorneys said Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The Monday verdict wraps up a rare corruption trial in West Africa and closes a chapter in the long trajectory of a strongman who helped lead two coups before serving two terms as president and becoming a counterterrorism partner to Western nations including the U.S.<\/p>\n
US SANCTIONS 3 SUDANESE OFFICIALS OVER TIES TO EX-DICTATOR AL-BASHIR<\/strong><\/p>\n In the landmark 11-month trial, Aziz and other top Mauritanian officials were accused of siphoning money from the country to enrich themselves. It marked a rare instance in which an African leader was tried for corruption, though Aziz’s lawyers long framed the trial as a matter of score-settling between him and current President Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ghazouani.<\/p>\n “This is a political verdict whose ultimate objective is to deprive the president of civic rights,” defense lawyer Taleb Khyar told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n Then-President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz of Mauritania appears at the Arab Economic and Social Development Summit, in Beirut, Lebanon, Jan. 20, 2019.<\/span> (AP Photo\/Bilal Hussein, File)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The two men were long allies, but their relations soured after Ghazouani replaced Aziz as president in 2019 in the country’s first peaceful transfer of government since independence.<\/p>\n Ghazouani and Aziz fought over Aziz’s attempts to take over a major political party after leaving office. A parliamentary commission subsequently opened a corruption inquiry against Aziz and 11 other defendants in 2020. In Monday’s verdict, the court cleared four former government ministers \u2014 including two prime ministers \u2014 of the same charges.<\/p>\n CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP<\/strong><\/p>\n The court ordered the confiscation of Aziz’s illegally acquired property. It dropped several charges, including embezzlement and harm to the public good.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [ad_1] A Mauritanian court handed down a five-year prison sentence to the country’s former President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz after finding him guilty of money laundering and self-enrichment, his attorneys said Tuesday. The Monday verdict wraps up a rare corruption trial in West Africa and closes a chapter in the long trajectory of a strongman …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14381,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14379"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Mohamed](\"https:\/\/a57.foxnews.com\/static.foxnews.com\/foxnews.com\/content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/1200\/675\/mohamed_ould_abdel_aziz.jpg?ve=1&tl=1\")
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