The photo has been used for illustrative purposes.

Gulf Today, Staff Reporter

The Abu Dhabi Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction over money laundering and tax evasion offences, sentenced a former Chairman of the Board of Directors of a government-owned Abu Dhabi company and a CEO at the same company, to 15 years in prison for committing money laundering crimes by taking advantage of their position in the company to the detriment of public funds, and compelled them to pay a fine and return about Dhs8 billion to the two victim companies.

The Court also ordered the seizure of the proceeds of the money laundering crime and the property of equivalent value, sentenced the two accused to pay an amount of Dhs501,000 as temporary compensation for the two companies claiming civil rights, and ordered the deportation of the second accused after serving his prison sentence.

A view of the Abu Dhabi Court.

As regards the facts of the case, the two accused committed the crimes of money laundering, misappropriation of public funds, forgery and use of forged documents, by deliberately transferring and concealing the real nature of the funds obtained from the offence of intentional prejudice to the interest of their employing party and misappropriation of funds, with the intention of concealing the origin, location, movement and rights thereto, and injected these funds into false investment transactions with several companies.

The investigations conducted by the Public Prosecution in Abu Dhabi into the crime of money laundering after it was discovered in the context of corruption cases in which the first and second accused were involved, revealed that the accused exploited the names of the two victim companies to enter into agreements with companies outside the country, and that was done based on individual decisions using their professional powers in the employing company.

This coincided with the conclusion of other parallel and identical agreements with the same foreign companies, but this time with companies in which they cloned the name of the company in which they work, so that the actual transactions took place with the cloned companies but benefited the accused personally by leaving the charges and obligations on the backs of the original company, in order to achieve their basic objective, which is to pour money from the agreements and contracts into their personal bank accounts.

The investigations also showed that the accused created several companies outside the country for the purpose of camouflage and to create confusion between the original company and the companies that were established outside the country to cover up the illegal activities and the real intentions of the accused, i.e. the misappropriation of funds, then using accounts and other companies to divide and distribute the funds to those involved in the crimes, and finally transferring them to other accounts in order to conceal their illegal sources as part of a money laundering scheme.