The panel headed by Counselor Abdullah Al-Othman also sentenced a travel manager to two years and four months behind bars while ordering both defendants to pay a fine and confiscating the full KD 551,000, a judicial media channel that tracks court proceedings reported. The convictions covered embezzlement of public funds, forgery of official invoices, money laundering and inflating participant numbers in sports events. The court upheld the acquittal of a former sports federation president implicated in the same matter.
Details outlined in the ruling show the defendants submitted fabricated invoices claiming expenditures on training camps in Italy that authorities determined never took place. The group manipulated headcounts of athletes at tournaments and preparatory camps staged in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and South Korea to draw larger sums from public budgets. This approach allowed the siphoning of the assessed KD 551,000 that the verdict now requires be returned to the state.
The Kuwait Anti-Corruption Authority referred the sports federation head and associates to public prosecution in March 2025 on suspicion of embezzling public money and causing unintentional damage to state property, Nazaha said in an official statement released at the time. The authority affirmed it would continue investigating every credible corruption report submitted through any channel and assemble supporting evidence. Nazaha’s involvement marked the formal start of proceedings that concluded with Monday’s appeal verdict.
A similar matter involving the fencing federation produced a four-year prison sentence and KD 271,000 fine for its former president in February 2025 on money laundering and forgery charges tied to more than KD 1.18 million, Al-Rai newspaper reported. That case likewise featured a travel employee who received a three-year term for assisting in the scheme. Such outcomes illustrate recurring patterns of scrutiny applied to financial management across national sports organizations.
The Public Authority for Sports allocates budgets to multiple federations for international competitions, foreign training camps and related travel costs each year. Judicial accounts indicate that several federation-linked embezzlement probes have advanced to trial since Nazaha intensified its reviews of public sports spending. Monday’s decision forms the latest chapter in these accountability measures.
Convicted parties retain the right to pursue further legal recourse under Kuwaiti procedures even after the appeal ruling. The confiscation component of the sentence applies directly to the embezzled amount once the judgment is executed. No additional personal identifiers for the defendants appeared in the public summary of the verdict.
