By IANS,
Tehran : Thirty-two people were tried in an Iranian court Saturday for cheating banks out of $2.6 billion, the official media reported.
They could face death if convicted, Xinhua quoted the state-run IRNA news agency as saying. The defendants included the managing director of the Amir Mansour Aria company.
Nearly $2.6 billion was swindled out of several banks over a period of two years by the company and illegally bought state-owned assets.
The former CEO of Melli Bank, one of Iran’s largest banks, has reportedly fled to Canada after the embezzlement scandal was exposed last year.
Central Bank’s deputy head Hamid Pourmohammadi along with other banking officials was arrested in October over the embezzlement case, one of the biggest frauds in the country’s history.