December 06-2013
. . . owe $1 million in unpaid federal taxes
A federal court in Oregon has sentenced an Iranian-American man and wife to one year and a day each in prison for hiding income and avoiding almost a million dollars in federal taxes.
They also ran afoul of the US sanctions laws by sending money to Iran for investments but hiding it as a charitable contribution.
Altogether the couple was ordered to pay the US government almost $2 million in fines and back taxes,
Hossein Lahiji, 50, and his wife, Najmeh Vahid Dastjerdi, in her early 30s, live in McAllen, Texas. They were convicted in June by a jury in Portland, Oregon, for conspiracy to defraud the United States and to engage in money laundering.
Hossein Lahiji is a physician specializing in urology, and his wife is an attorney with her own solo practice.
. . . owe $1 million in unpaid federal taxes
The couple’s lawyer argued against any prison time, saying they had already been punished severely. Lahiji has lost his medical practice and his wife will likely be deported, meaning that the husband will be forced to move to Iran as well. The couple’s attorney wrote the judge, “All that he and his wife have built here in the United States has been lost.”
The defendants were each ordered to pay $200,000 in fines and jointly to pay restitution in the amount of $973,503 to the Internal Revenue Service for back taxes owed. The court also confirmed the jury’s verdict forfeiting an additional $600,000 that was involved in a money laundering offense—the dispatch of investment funds to Iran disguised as charitable contributions.
Trial evidence showed that defendants provided funds to an Iranian-American charity in Portland, the Child Foundation, between 1998 and 2006.
The Child Foundation, in turn, gave the defendants charitable donation receipts and transferred the funds to Iran. Defendants claimed charitable deductions from their income taxes for these payments. Some of the funds were used to purchase a building in Tehran in the name of Hossein Lahiji’s sister. Additional funds were used to invest in an interest-bearing account in an Iranian bank.
The 1995 sanctions imposed by President Bill Clinton bar any one subject to American law—basically anyone living in the United States whether a citizen or not—from investing in Iran.
Additional funds were indeed charitable contributions, paid as a religious tax to Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, a strong supporter of the regime, who was among the most vocal clerics fighting the proposal of President Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad to allow women into soccer stadiums. Makarem-Shirazi has also condemned the keeping of dogs as pets, saying the interest in keeping such pets was “blindly imitating the West,” something he said he believes will result in “evil outcomes.” The ayatollah has also called the Holocaust a “superstition.”
Some of the Lahijis’ payments were backdated to facilitate claims of charitable donations for a year prior to the year of actual payment.
The prosecution said the couple’s “motivations is engaging in this conduct is greed. The prosecution said the couple had built up savings totaling $20 million, “and yet $20 million was not enough.”
The Child Foundation and Mehrdad Yasrebi were separately prosecuted as co-conspirators and sentenced in March 2012.
The Child Foundation has since reorganized and continues to operate under the supervision of federal probation officers.
The couple’s travails with the US government are not over, however. They have been charged in a separate federal indictment in Houston with health care fraud. The trial there is due to start next April.