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US court gives Norway Bieber fraudster 11 years

A Los Angeles court has handed an 11-year jail term to a well-known Norwegian innovator who fraudulently claimed to own the rights to Justin Bieber concerts before conning an American investor out of $1 million.

Published: 10 March 2014 23:13 CET
US court gives Norway Bieber fraudster 11 years
Justin Bieber performs in New York, 2012. Photo: Shutterstock.

Waleed Ahmed, 22, from Skien, had already pleaded guilty to the charges laid against him after he sold on the rights he fraudulently claimed to hold to the teen pop star’s concerts in Scandinavia, public broadcaster NRK reports. 

Prosecutors had called for Ahmed to be jailed for nine years, but District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez opted for a tougher sentence.

The decision to lengthen the term surprised the defendant’s Norwegian lawyer, Hans Marius Graasvold, who told NRK he would speak to his American counterpart on Tuesday to decide whether to lodge an appeal.

Before gaining notoriety for the Bieber fraud, Ahmed was widely regarded as one of Norway’s brightest innovators.

In 2011, NRK branded him Norway’s Mark Zuckerberg, as his plans for a solar-powered phone-cover charger earned him plaudits from the then enterprise minister and Crown Prince Haakon.

But when reporters from business news site E24 began to look into his purported big-money deals, they found that many of his claims didn’t add up, NRK reports. It even emerged that the phone-cover charger had in fact been invented by somebody else. 

In autumn 2012 NRK reported that the promising would-be innovator had been arrested and charged with fraud. 

In 2013, an Oslo court found him guilty in his absence of swindling a Swiss investor out of 3.5 million kroner ($587,000), Dagens Næringsliv reports. 

He has also been charged with insurance fraud after falsely claiming his car had been stolen, reports NRK. 

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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