Wife of banker facing Dh4.7m fraud case says her husband is innocent

DUBAI: The wife of a banker suspected to be involved in a Dh4.7-million loan fraud case said their family has fallen on extremely bad times with no money for rent, food, children’s school fees and her husband’s lawyer fees.

Ayesha, 37, wife of Pakistani banker Syed Haider, 42, claims the main suspect who hatched the plan is now in jail while her husband was given bail.

“It’s painful to see our two daughters skip school (after her husband was jailed). I would be grateful for any help to alleviate our situation,” said the mother of three children aged 12, eight and five.

“My husband wants to face this case with confidence because we know he did nothing wrong,” Ayesha told XPRESS.

Their troubles began in December 2011, after her husband was held over personal loans vetted by him and released by his bank to seven Arab women, who it later turned out had used fake identities.

Syed worked as senior credit control manager for a major bank in the UAE when his branch manager told him to check the loan application of female employees of an event management company based in Media City.

Syed’s job involved checking whether the applicants’ passports were genuine and to ensure the photographs matched their faces.

“I saw the passports myself and found them to be genuine, but their faces were covered with a niqab and I did not insist on asking them to take it off. I think they took advantage of that,” said Syed.

Nothing seemed amiss when the women paid their monthly instalments on time. But seven months after the loan the instalments stopped and Syed’s life took a turn for the worse.

The bank hired a loan recovery company but even they could not locate the women.

To make matters worse, even as her husband was in a mess, Ayesha who worked as a bank call centre staff, lost her job, plunging their family into a crisis.

greed and tragedy

“Somebody else enjoyed that money, but not my husband. Otherwise, I would have had part of that money. We would have absconded with it,” she said.

With no income for the last 16 months, she said her family is being punished with a “slow death”.

“My heart aches when I see the sullen faces of our children. We cannot go back as our passports are with the court. We have been surviving on charity from friends, but how long would it last?”

Ayesha said they have already sold the jewellery she had from their wedding to help the family tide over the tough times.

Ayesha is desperate for help and is backing her husband to help him redeem his name. “My husband has been advised to find a lawyer. How’s that possible, when we’re not even able to pay our rent or our children’s school?”