KUWAIT: Under its new directorship, the state security department is preparing to provide the public prosecution with new supplementary investigations in the money laundering and inflated accounts case involving a number of celebrities, informed sources told Al-Rai.

"A number of influencers referred for investigations managed to provide convincing evidence justifying, to a large extent, the inflation of their bank accounts, while others failed to do so and claimed losing the receipts and proofs because those went too far back and they did not keep them," the sources explained.

"The investigations previously conducted by the state security department were not professional enough as they mainly tracked the accounts, interrogated some celebrities and referred their testimonies to the prosecution instead of proper investigations, which made it hard to prove whether they were guilty or innocent," the sources added. Moreover, legal sources stressed supplementary investigations currently underway will shift the course of investigations in some cases.

Responding to a question whether it would be likely to correlate the cases of the celebrities and inflated accounts with other cases, the sources said: "Let us not jump to conclusions, but everything is possible. Anyhow, there are indicators that another case might be related to one of the controversial celebrities." The sources noted that unusual transactions conducted through the concerned bank accounts synchronized with considerable activity in the fields of real estate, precious watches, yachts and remittances abroad.