January 25, 2019
An Iranian-born professor at Britain’s Cambridge University has been jailed for four years for stealing 1 million pounds ($1.25 million) from a UK government energy project.
Dr. Ehsan Abdi-Jalebi, 37, was taken into custody at Heathrow Airport in May 2016 when he was found with 100,000 pounds ($125,000) in cash in a chocolate box as he boarded a flight bound for Tehran.
That discovery set off an investigation by the National Crime Agency, which found he had used fake documents to siphon off money into his own accounts from funding allocated to the development of renewable energy projects.
He had used the funds to develop a property in Iran worth 900,000 pounds ($1,125,000) and to lease a Maserati sports car as well as a property in Cambridge, England, where he lived.
Abdi-Jalebi had won international acclaim for his work on wind turbines and set up his own technology firm, Wind Technologies Ltd., in 2006.
He received project funding totaling 2.8 million pounds ($3.5 million) in grants from the British government and the European Union.
Investigators discovered that his firm had made a series of grant applications to the government to fund research, but Abdi-Jalebi falsified documents, including invoices, accounts and bank statements, to disguise what he was doing with the money.
He also used the bank accounts of some of his doctoral students to receive what were referenced as “studentship payments,” with the money then being transferred into his own personal accounts.
Judge Martin Beddoe told Abdi-Jalebi: “Of the funding dishonestly obtained you trousered 1 million pounds for yourself.” He thus siphoned off more than a third of what he was given for research work.
Prosecutor Jonathan Polnay said the fraud was “a long-running course of conduct.”
Following his arrest, Abdi-Jalebi lost his fellowship at Churchill College in Cambridge as the National Crime Agency (NCA) spent 18 months examining his financial history.
NCA senior investigating officer Ian Truby told the court: “While the companies that Dr. Abdi-Jalebi was involved with were doing some legitimate work in the field of renewable energy, he used them as a cash cow to siphon off money.
“While we have identified a number of UK assets held by Abdi-Jalebi, the likelihood is that most of the money ended up in Iran, which will make it far more difficult to recover.”
Defense attorney David Sonn said: “He has been on bail for two years, preventing him from visiting his family in Iran and missing the one-year anniversary of his father’s death. He has asked me to express his regret and his apologies to his funders, his co-directors, the scientific community and the universities.”
Abdi-Jalebi admitted to 13 counts of fraud and was jailed for four years.
