MIAMI, CMC – Legal professionals for the disgraced former premier of the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Andrew Fahie, are asking a federal court docket to condemn him to 10 years in jail for the function he performed in a plot to smuggle huge portions of cocaine by Tortola to the mainland United States.
Earlier this month, his legal professional, Theresa Van Vliet, filed a movement asking that his sentencing be postponed from June 25 to August 5, citing a scheduling battle as the rationale for the postponement.
This isn’t the primary time Fahie’s sentencing has been deferred. Initially set for April 2024, it was pushed to June and now probably additional into the summer time, drawing much more public and media scrutiny.
Fahie, 53, was convicted of cocaine smuggling and cash laundering prices on February 8 this yr. He had been arrested on April 28, 2022, together with the BVI’s Ports Authority managing director, Oleanvine Pickering Maynard, who pleaded responsible and is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday.
Her son, Kadeem Maynard, was arrested on St. Thomas the identical day and, in a plea deal, was sentenced to 4 years and 9 months in jail.
Fahie faces the potential for life in jail and a US$10 million high-quality. However his attorneys ask the decide to condemn him to a ten-year jail time period.
The attorneys are claiming that the previous premier had solely a minor function within the plot, had no data of a aspect deal between Maynard and authorities brokers posing as drug runners, and didn’t import any cocaine.
“Mr. Fahie objects to the suggestion that the offense concerned the importation of cocaine. The manufactured scheme on this legislation enforcement sting known as for purported drug sellers to make use of the port at Tortola within the BVI as a brief storage facility for a substance that may finally be transported to Puerto Rico after which on to Miami, Florida.
“Nonetheless, as there have been no laboratory exams of any substance, there isn’t any proof {that a} combination and substance containing a detectable quantity of cocaine would have been transported from a spot outdoors the USA (BVI) into a spot inside the USA (Puerto Rico),” the attorneys argued of their movement filed earlier this month.
Additionally they claimed he by no means truly had interactions with Lebanese Hezbollah operatives. Prosecutors had stated Pickering Maynard and her son had been falsely advised they have been coping with the Sinaloa Drug Cartel and Lebanese terrorists within the deal. Fahie’s attorneys argued no such terrorists have been concerned with Fahie.
“The crimes of which Mr. Fahie stands convicted didn’t contain the Lebanese people the Confidential Supply recognized as Hezbollah operatives. The mere suggestion of an entirely unsupported connection between Mr. Fahie and members of a delegated terrorist group is extremely prejudicial and inflammatory. It requires any reference to ‘Hezbollah’ to be faraway from the PSR.”
Fahie, who has been a legislator since 1999, and his attorneys don’t help the view that, as an elected public official, his crime warranted a extra extreme sentence.
“In comparison with each Okay. Maynard and O. Maynard, the diploma to which Mr. Fahie understood the scope and construction of the purported scheme was way more restricted.
“Mr. Fahie had no half in planning or organizing the purported scheme and exercised no decision-making authority. The Maynards acknowledged that data was withheld from Mr. Fahie. At greatest, the Authorities’s proof confirmed that Mr. Fahie was extra of a figurehead than an energetic participant. Though he stood to earn a big amount of cash, he didn’t stand to earn as a lot because the members who can be extra everlasting and concerned within the ‘aspect deal,” the attorneys argued.
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