Investor charged with defrauding DED of Dh8.4m

Sunday, Jan 24, 2016

Dubai: An investor is accused of causing a Dh8.4 million loss to the Dubai Economic Department (DED) by tampering with electronic transactions, a court heard on Sunday.

The 30-year-old Egyptian investor, W.E., allegedly forged e-transactions relating to discounts for trade licences issued by DED and embezzled the amount in March.

Three other Egyptians, A.A., a businessman, M.R., an employee, and A.S. a typist, and a Syrian typist, A.N., were charged with aiding and abetting the investor in committing the forgery and fraud.

M.R. and A.S. appeared before the Dubai Court of First Instance on Sunday and pleaded not guilty.

Taking into account the failure of W.E., A.A. and A.N. to show up in courtroom seven, presiding judge Fahd Al Shamsi said: “The court has cancelled their bail and issued an arrest warrant against the trio; they will have to be detained and presented in court on February 7.”

Prosecutors said W.E. abused the authority granted to him to carry out transactions at a mall’s business centre, from where he accessed DED’s e-system, forged transactions and embezzled Dh8.4 million.

A DED official said the fraud was detected after a client visited the department to discuss a discount.

“The client came to the registration section to revise a transaction and informed them that he had received a discount twice before. When we discovered that there was a discount larger than the usual, we checked the system. It was discovered that W.E. had accessed the e-system to renew a licence without collecting the Dubai Municipality [DM] fees. The revised transaction clearly showed that the suspect had bypassed the box of DM fees and renewed the licence … he tampered with the mentioned fees. Further investigations with the IT section unveiled that more transactions had been processed against discounts within the past two years. When we asked the applicants about those transactions, we realised that the transactions had been carried out at a mall’s fast track business centre. We contacted the centre’s manager, who informed us that W.E. had recently aroused his suspicion when he accessed the e-system and switched off the surveillance cameras system,” testified the official.

A police lieutenant told prosecutors that upon questioning W.E. the latter admitted that he had carried out a number of illegal transactions for monetary gains.

“Further interrogations revealed that the four other suspects had aided and abetted W.E.,” he added.

The trial continues.

By Bassam Zaza Legal and Court ?Correspondent