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Accountant locked up for Dh305,000 fraud

A woman accountant was sentenced to three months in jail by the Court of First Instance on Monday for swindling more than Dh305,000 from her employer after tampering with cheques he had given her for office expenses.

The 33-year-old Tunisian was exposed in May last year when her employer, a 44-year-old Emirati businessman, received a phone call from his bank. The banker was verifying whether the employer had given the defendant a cheque of Dh149,000.

The employer’s answer was that the cheque was for Dh49,000. The defendant claimed that she added a digit by mistake and had to rectify the mistake by writing the same value in letters so that not to be embarrassed in front of the bank staff. She denied having forged her employer’s signature and asked for his forgiveness.

When the complainant checked a statement of account from the bank, he discovered that the accountant had tampered with cheques many times before by adding digits to increase the sums she would collect. She had been in charge of the general accounting in his engineering office since 2009. She handled the payment of employees’ salaries and other expenditure.

Her employer also found out that she would sometimes fill in cheques, which she had cut from his cheque book, with the sums she wanted. She collected the money after forging her employer’s signature. She had defrauded him of more than Dh305,000, he claimed.

mary@khaleejtimes.com