DUBAI The ordeal of an Indian man who spent a year jobless and in penury after getting embroiled in a bank fraud case last January ended this week when he was finally allowed to fly back home.
Selly Furtado, 27, was under investigation for months after his passport was allegedly forged to open a bank account for a multi-million dirham transaction. Only last month, after he was found innocent, the authorities handed his passport back to him.
“I may be free today, but I have lost all my self respect, my standing in the society, my career and pretty much everything else I had in this due course of time, for no fault of mine,” Furtado, from Goa, told XPRESS before he left the UAE over the weekend. “Today no one believes me that I had no involvement. I may have got a lot of help from all quarters – from my church, from my company, from my community and I may even recover financially in the future, but the scars of being looked down upon and being treated like a criminal will remain for long,” he added.
On September 25 last year, when Furtado’s passport was held by police pending investigation, XPRESS reported how the commerce graduate got a rude shock while applying for a new job on completion of his old contract at a company in the Sharjah Industrial Free Zone. “An officer from Bur Dubai police station called me one day in January, saying they were making an enquiry and I needed to see him. When I went, I was locked up. Apparently a bank account was opened in my name and a Dh4 million transaction had taken place,” Furtado, who had since remained out of a job and without a valid visa, had said then.
According to Furtado, an initial probe had revealed that someone else had used a forged passport with Furtado’s credentials and passport number even though other details were different. “The case dragged on for almost 12 months before I got back my passport and an ‘out pass’ was issued for me. Only I know how I managed all this while on help and charity from others,” said Furtado who often slept rough and in temporary accommodations all this time, often eating just one meal a day.
