Dubai: A construction site’s supervisor and a security guard lost their appeals and will be jailed for three months each for stealing their company’s iron scrap and selling it.
The Pakistani supervisor and his countryman guard landed in trouble when the site’s Egyptian engineer exposed them.
The Egyptian engineer accidentally saw the security guard selling the scrap worth Dh5,000 to the Pakistani pickup driver when he walked into the site in the Business Bay area in April.
When the engineer asked the driver what he was doing with his pick-up parked in the site, he replied that he was collecting iron scrap.
The engineer was told that the supervisor had permitted the guard to allow the driver to load the scrap on the pick-up but when the Egyptian discovered that two employees had been selling the scrap, he reported the same to the police.
In August, the Dubai Court of First Instance jailed the two defendants for three months for stealing iron scrap and selling it without the employer’s consent.
The Pakistani duo appealed this verdict at the Court of Appeals. The presiding judge rejected the defendants’ appeal and upheld their three-month imprisonment.
According to the appellate ruling, they will both be deported after serving their jail terms.
When they defended themselves in court, the duo claimed that they took the iron scrap because it was thrown away and nobody would use it.
The engineer said once he arrived at the construction site at 1pm, he spotted an unauthorised pick-up parked inside and someone was loading scrap on it.
“I saw the driver using a forklift to move the scrap but I stopped him. Then the guards handed me a phone and asked me to speak to the site supervisor, who told me that he was the one who had asked the driver to load the iron on the pick-up. The supervisor then came over to the site, I called the company’s managers … the defendants admitted that they had been selling the scrap. We informed them that what they had been doing is a theft and called the police,” the engineer said.
