His accomplice was an employee.
A businessman and an employee have been charged at the Dubai Court of First Instance after they allegedly defrauded a private school of Dh917,000.
Public prosecution records show the incident dates back to December 9, 2014, when the Egyptian businessman and his Bahraini accomplice handed over a letter of a security deposit against which they got the amount from the school. They falsely attributed the letter to a bank and faked its seal on it.
They are accused of fraud, faking a seal of a company and using the fake seal, forgery and use of forged official document.
A case was registered at the Bur Dubai police station. “Our private school (the plaintiff) wanted in 2014 to have a gym constructed on its campus. A bid for tenders was open and the businessman’s company won it,” the 60-year-old school representative said.
The Somali witness recounted, in front of the prosecution investigator, how they had signed a contract with the main accused for the gym project. “We asked him to hand over a bank security deposit which is 10 per cent of the contract value. Our request was an essential condition in the contract. On December 9, 2014, we paid him Dh917,000, worth of first instalment, right after he gave us the bank security letter.”
However, the businessman did not honour his part of the deal. “His company did not proceed into constructing the gym as we had agreed upon in the contract. We learned from the bank later that the letter he had given to us as a security deposit was forged and not issued by the bank. We complained against him at the Bur Dubai police station,” the witness recalled.
A 44-year-old Egyptian civil engineer told the investigator that in 2014 he was in the defendant’s office when his accomplice came and introduced himself as an employee at a bank. “The employee confirmed the businessman’s claims that he could issue a bank security deposit against a certain percentage (of the deposit).
The businessman is held in detention in connection with another case. The court will release a ruling on March 23.
