Ramon Abbas, popularly known as Hushpuppi has been denied bail by a court in the Northern District of Illinois on Monday.
The court said, he would remain in detention until his final trial later this year over money laundering accusations.
He had asked to live with a girlfriend’s relative in Illinois but this was queried by the prosecutor, Assistant United States Attorney Melody Wells, arguing that he had up to this point “never visited” the girlfriend or their child in the US.
“There is no evidence that he has ever even met this ‘Uncle’ who would be the third-party custodian under these circumstances,” Wells said
Abbas would be transported to Los Angeles by the United States Marshals Service, and will not be given an option to live with his girlfriend’s uncle in Homewood, Illinois.
Throughout the hearing, Hushpuppi’s lawyer denied that his client was a danger to the community or a flight risk, repeatedly rejecting the allegations made against his client by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s affidavit posted earlier this month.
The primary allegation levelled by the FBI is that Abbas was part of a network that made “hundreds of millions of dollars” from business email compromise frauds and other scams.
Melody Wells, a prosecutor in the Chicago district attorney’s office, convinced the court that Abbas is a flight risk, describing his “significant” financial assets, “deep ties to foreign countries” and a lack of ties to the United States, saying that Hushpuppi had the “perfect recipe to flee the charges that he faces here.”
The court ruled that there was “more than enough justification to order that the US Marshall bring Abbas to California as soon as possible to answer the complaint there.”
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