41 men, women jailed for embezzling Dh34 million

Ajman: 41 men and women will spend five to 15 years in jail after they were convicted of embezzling more than Dh34 million from two government departments in Ajman and Sharjah, Ajman criminal court ruled on Thursday.

The court also ordered each of them to pay a fine of Dh60,000 and ordered freezing of bank accounts of companies that dealt with the accused.

The incident came to the sight after Ajman and Sharjah government departments discovered the stolen funds by accident and reported the issue to Ajman public prosecutor.

The two departments found that huge funds had been withdrawn from their accounts without their knowledge and different names were listed in their documents and these names had connection with the two departments.

Police investigations revealed that 41 Arab men and women were involved in the crime and they embezzling a total of 34.673 million.

The police also found that the funds were embezzled by forging cheques and cashing them from five banks with the help of some bank employees.

The accused forged cheques of different banks in an Arab country, sent them via courier and encashed them in the names of different companies involved in contracting, general services and maintenance. The owners of these companies got a percentage of the embezzled money, which was withdrawn from accounts of the two government departments.

The accused also forged signatures to withdraw funds from bank accounts of government departments in Sharjah and Ajman over the past year, The accused paid huge amount of bribe in cash to bank employees in order to persuade them to accept fraudulent cheques, the investigation found.

In one instance, the accused gave forged cheques worth Dh6 million, pocketed Dh5 million and paid Dh1 million bribe to employees of the banks.

Police found a large number of jewellery, gold bracelets and branded watches and a huge amount of cash from  one accused, who was mediating and deposited the cheques into the accounts.