Dubai court acquits duo of forging cheques worth Dhs5.9 million

Dubai Misdemeanor Court acquitted two people of charges of forging and using unofficial documents and attempting to seize Dhs5.9 million after it had concluded that the evidence was insufficient and doubted the validity of attributing the accusations to them.

The court also rejected the civil lawsuit filed against them and obligated its filer to pay the incurred expenses and lawyer’s fees. The case dated back to a report filed by the owner of a company, in which he accused former company officials of taking advantage of a number of blank cheques signed and adding data related to their value, due dates and the beneficiary’s name before submitting four of them to two local banks for payment.

The cheques, however, were returned due to insufficient funds.

The Public Prosecution charged the accused with forging three cheques drawn on the company’s account and another issued through the plaintiff’s personal account and using them while knowing they were forged to attempt to seize the value written on the cheques. One of the defendants was also charged separately with embezzling other cheques that were given to him by virtue of his work to be used to fulfill the company’s obligations.

The defendant present in court denied the charges, asserting that he had not been involved in issuing the cheques. He pleaded that the complaint was filed after he a verdict issued by the labour court had obligated the company to pay his financial dues.

The defendant’s defence team also submitted documents related to the nature of his work and previous disputes between him and the company.

The other defendant did not appear despite being legally notified.

After reviewing the plaintiff’s statements and the company accountant’s testimony, the court noted inconsistent accounts regarding how the cheques were delivered, who received them and when each defendant was added to the complaint.

It was also found that the witness was unable to identify the numbers or values of some of the cheques and could not definitively state the contents of a sealed envelope he handed to one of the defendants.

According to Dr Alaa Nasr, debtor’s legal representative, the verdict embodied a fundamental guarantee in criminal justice that a conviction was not based on probability or conflicting statements, but rather on conclusive and coherent evidence that proved the incident and its attribution to the accused in a way that left no room for doubt. He explained that the mere presence of a person’s name on a cheque was not sufficient on its own to prove forgery or embezzlement.

The court examined the sequence of events, the timing of the reports and the documents submitted and weighed the statements of the parties before concluding that there was a deficiency in the criminal evidence and that there were other possibilities that were not revealed in the documents, he said.

The rejection of the civil case was a natural result of the lack of proof of an error attributed to the defendants that caused harm to the plaintiff, he added.