A judge at the United Kingdom’s Westminster Magistrates Court ruled on Thursday the founder of collapsed Dubai-based private equity company Abraaj Group could be extradited to the United States, where he is wanted on fraud charges, but said the government should make the final decision.
Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot rejected the arguments made by Arif Naqvi’s counsel and ordered the case to the Secretary of State for her decision. In her written judgement, the judge ruled there were no bars to extradition under several articles of Britain’s 2003 Extradition Act. He can choose to appeal the decision under Section 92 of the Extradition Act 2003 once the Home Secretary makes one.
Naqvi, whose extradition hearing started last year, is among several people charged by US prosecutors with being part of an international scheme to defraud investors including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Naqvi previously denied the charges through a public relations firm.
Naqvi’s lawyers had argued that US authorities intended to rely extensively on the evidence of his co-accused Sev Vettivettipillai, a former managing director of Abraaj, who was based in the UK.
Dubai-based Abraaj was the largest buyout fund in the Middle East and North Africa until it collapsed in 2018 after investors raised concerns about the management of its $1 billion healthcare fund.
Naqvi’s lawyers had said at the time that the extradition request should be refused as a substantial part of his activity central to the US allegations was based in London, including Abraaj’s investor coverage team, in addition to his family ties to the city.
“If the group had a beating heart it was in Dubai, but its mind and control was wherever Arif was, which was often in London, which is where the main investor coverage operation was,” the defence’s skeleton argument had quoted Adnan Siddiqui, Abraaj’s former general counsel, as saying. If extradited, the document said, there were grounds for believing Naqvi might be detained before a US trial.
In New York, he might be held in either the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) or the Metropolitan Detention Centre (MDC), the defence said, adding conditions would be incompatible with Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Naqvi was arrested in the United Kingdom in 2019 and was released from custody on bail the same year. If convicted in the US, Naqvi was most likely to be sentenced to over 30 years’ imprisonment and could begin serving that sentence in a high security institution, the document said further.
