The Algerian prosecutor again requested life imprisonment against the former “Golden Boy” Rafik Khalifa on Wednesday, involved in one of the biggest financial scandals in Algeria, when his trial reopened, according to local media.
He also requested the confiscation of all the property of the ex-businessman imprisoned in Blida, near Algiers, since his extradition in late 2013 from the United Kingdom where he had fled.
The trial of the fraudulent bankruptcy of the Khalifa Bank, founded by the defendant, reopened on Sunday before the court of Blida after the favorable response of the Supreme Court to the cassation appeal presented by the defense of several defendants, of the verdict delivery 2015.
Rafik Khalifa was then sentenced to 18 years in prison after the prosecution requested life imprisonment.
Present in court since Sunday, Khalifa and 12 co-defendants were prosecuted for the charges: “constitution of a criminal association”, “falsification of official documents and use of forgeries”, “theft in a meeting, fraud, abuse of trust and corruption” and “fraudulent bankruptcy”.
Rafilk Khalifa defended himself by asserting that his bank funds had been “looted” as soon as he fled Algeria in 2003, “with the complicity of those around him.
In an interview in 2003, he accused Bouteflika of being the instigator of the cabal against the khalifa group in France in order to legitimize the liquidation of the bank and the dismantling of the group. But he had not given more details on the underside of this scandal of the century as described by the local press.
During s first trial in 2007, this 54-year-old former member of the jet-set, courted in Algiers and Paris, was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment.
After the bankruptcy of his group in 2003 and that of Khalifa Bank, which would have caused damage of nearly five billion dollars to the State and to savers, Khalifa took refuge in London.
In 2014, he was sentenced by default in France to five years in prison for embezzling millions of euros.
The Khalifa group was formed around a bank, an airline, and two television channels and employed 20,000 people in Algeria and Europe.
