Imam, mosque foundation prosecuted for perjury, money laundering

The Public Prosecution Service (OM) is prosecuting a 42-year-old man from Tilburg and a mosque foundation for perjury, money laundering, and forgery. According to the OM, the man and the foundation he represented lied to a parliamentary committee investigating whether other countries were exerting influence on mosques in the Netherlands. They also refused to cooperate in the parliamentary inquiry, the OM said on Monday.

According to ANP, the suspect is imam Suhayb S. of the Utrecht alFitrah mosque. His 39-year-old wife will also be prosecuted for forgery. “The husband and wife jointly signed a letter to the committee containing partly incomplete and partly untrue information,” the OM said.

The OM pointed out that cooperating with a parliamentary inquiry is mandatory, and refusing to do so is punishable. “Both the main suspect personally and the foundation he represented are accused of not having cooperated.” The OM said they failed to provide the requested documents and lied under oath about concluding Islamic marriages and not having the foundation’s annual accounts.

FIOD, the Tax Authority’s investigative department, also investigated the foundation and its directors, including the two suspects, for possible terrorist financing. Investigators found no sign of this but did find indications of money laundering, the OM said.

The parliamentary committee investigated the possible undesirable influence on mosques by regimes in unfree countries in 2019 and 2020.

S.’s lawyer Anis Boumanjal told ANP that the OM’s decision to prosecute is “remarkable.” According to the lawyer, S. has been living in uncertainty about the FIOD investigation for a long time. About the perjury accusations, Boumanjal said: “It’s a matter of what you can or cannot remember. Perjury involves knowingly lying, and there is no question of that.”