GEORGETOWN – The long-simmering international corruption investigation targeting prominent Guyanese businessmen has erupted into a major legal crisis, with Azruddin Mohamed and his father, Nazar Mohamed, formally indicted in a Florida Court in the United States. The father and son face a total of 11 combined charges, including explosive allegations of wire fraud, gold smuggling, and money laundering.
The indictment, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, confirms the severity of the accusations: each charge carries a potential maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment, meaning the two men face decades behind bars if convicted.
The indictment validates an earlier, devastating move by the U.S. government, giving crucial context to the severity of the allegations. The Mohameds were originally sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in 2024. These sanctions alleged a major corruption network, claiming that between 2019 and 2023, the family’s company, Mohamed’s Enterprise, omitted over 10,000 kilograms of gold from import and export declarations, thereby allegedly avoiding more than US$50 million in duties and taxes owed to the Government of Guyana.
The OFAC sanctions provided the essential foundation for the current criminal charges, exposing a network that critics claim undermined Guyana’s sovereignty. The sanctions alleged that the Mohameds achieved their illicit gains by bribing Guyanese government officials to ensure the “undisrupted flow” of currency and illicit gold. The U.S. Treasury stated at the time that this activity served to “enrich the corrupt actors involved, undermine Guyanese institutions, and deprive the people of Guyana of important revenues.”
This formal indictment now shifts the case from a financial sanctions matter to a high-stakes criminal proceeding, forcing the two men to confront the full weight of the U.S. justice system over activities that have cast a long shadow over Guyana’s governance and precious gold sector.
