A Kenyan Member of Parliament is on the radar of United States authorities for reportedly evading a jail term.
Fafi MP Osman Mohamed was convicted with tax evasion in the US in 2015 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, reports Daily Nation.
Mohamed had reportedly been charged with 32 counts of aiding and assisting in the preparation of false tax returns amounting to $600,000 (KSh 60 million).
He was arrested by undercover Criminal Investigation unit detectives of the Internal Revenue Service who approached him to prepare their Federal Income Tax Returns for 2007.
Mohamed used a company he co-owned with Yahya Sheikh to make fraudulent tax return documents with the aim of seeking tax refunds for his clients.
“The undercover agents did not provide him with an indication that they had incurred any of the false deductions that were placed upon the completed income tax returns,” Federal Tax Alert, an online publication reported.
After his arrest, Mohamed entered into a plea bargain agreement with the prosecutors and implicated his partner Sheikh, who had already fled the US to Canada.
The politician later got himself deported to Kenya as an illegal immigrant before serving his sentence.
American authorities are seeking to have him extradited to the US to serve his sentence.
Mohamed is not new to controversy, as in December 2018, the MP stormed the Hagardera police station, slapped a police officer manning the cell, snatched the keys to the cells, opened the doors wide and released all the prisoners.
The OCS pleaded with the MP to stop doing the act but Hon. Osman instead threatened to discipline the said officer.
It is believed that most of the prisoners released Scot free by the mp were undocumented refugees, security risk individuals, illegal importers of goods and firearms from Somalia.
Osman along with Eldas MP Adan Keynan, Rehema Jaldesa (Isiolo) and Purity Ngirici (Kirinyaga) were in the middle of defamatory suit filed by Wajir woman rep Fatuma Gedi over an alleged sex tape.
The Fafi MP denied defaming Gedi, adding that he has not received any summons.
The unverified sex tape allegedly involving Gedi went viral in December last year.
The legislators were accused of uttering defamatory statements that portrayed the MP in bad light following the circulation of the unverified video, which Ms. Gedi dismissed as fake.
A blogger Douglas Mbaya was last year arrested and arraigned in a Nairobi court for allegedly circulating the video.
Gedi distanced herself from the sex tape, saying it was the work of her political rivals.