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States—Pras Michel, a rapper in the 1990s hit trio The Fugees, was found guilty Wednesday, April 26, of helping funnel money from a billion-dollar Malaysia scam into US politics.
After a trial that featured Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio as a witness, Michel was found guilty of illegal political donations, money laundering and related charges in the scandal engineered by flamboyant Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho.
In the early 2010s Low, now a fugitive believed hiding in China, helped funnel billions of dollars stolen from a Malaysian state investment fund known as 1MDB into luxury US real estate, fine art and Hollywood films like DiCaprio’s Wolf of Wall Street.
Michel, whose real first name is Prakazrel, was accused of helping Low secretly funnel some of that money into then-president Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign via shell companies, hiding the donations’ origins.
He was also accused of joining a clandestine lobbying effort with a senior Republican financier in 2017 to help the Chinese government secure the return of dissident billionaire Guo Wengui, who had close connections with president Donald Trump’s political strategist Steve Bannon.
