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DIB Scam: Witness Testifies in Favour of Accused

DUBAI - A legal consultant, who is a witness in the case of $500 million scam that Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB) was a victim of, said in a statement that the British businessman, 58, accused in the case did not have anything to do with the fraud.

The legal consultant, who is also British and worked for the accused, owner of Plantation Project in Dubai Land, testified in the Court of First Instance that his former boss entered the negotiations between the bank and one of the defendants because the latter was a partner in the Plantation Project.

“Plantation Project was owned by my boss 100 per cent. Later, he needed more capital so he let the two defendants (British businessmen) take up 30 per cent of the shares,” the witness said. He said that when the bank started negotiations for recovering its funds, one of the accused sought the help of his boss since his shares were not enough to enable him to pay a guarantee to the bank.

A per the case papers, the bank was defrauded of more than $500 million (Dh1.8 billion) through loans extended to five businessmen, three of them British, an American and a Turkish, to undertake projects.

The two ex-senior executives of the bank are accused of collecting bribes worth $750,000 and $950,000 in return for crossing their allowed job descriptions and grant the businessmen loans exceeding the maximum limit usually allowed by DIB. The Two British businessmen and the Turkish are accused of defrauding Dh 1.8 billion (about 500 million dollars) from DIB.

They are also accused of forging documents of bogus transactions made by companies they just established at some time between 2004 to 2007 and submitted them to the bank to get financing for their projects. The trio made use of the commercial relation between the Turkish businessman’s finance company (CCH) based abroad and DIB to Submit the fake transactions.

mary@khaleejtimes.com

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