An ex-administrative employee at a laboratory allegedly defrauded her workplace of more than Dh375,000 after she presented forged tuition fees and tenancy contracts and Dubai Water and Electricity Authority (Dewa) bills she had manipulated with.
The 50-year-old Portuguese allegedly forged as many as 44 receipts which she claimed were issued from Dewa by falsifying details in the copies, including the account holder’s name and the number of the residential flat. She then presented the forged documents to the administration where she worked to claim the money. She managed to collect Dh32,383.
She is also accused of forging 40 receipts of tuition fees which she falsely attributed to the school which her children attended. Those receipts were worth Dh123,475.
According to public prosecution records, she also submitted five bogus tenancy contracts to her workplace, worth Dh215,500.
She faced charges including fraud, forgery and use of forged documents in the Court of First Instance.
“We were running the internal audit in 2015 when we noticed some discrepancies in the payment receipts the accused submitted and alleged were issued from the school her children studied in. She had been collecting refunds on their tuition fees. But some of the receipts had inconsistent serial numbers. Since I already had begun to feel doubtful about those documents, I called the school and learned from the accounting section staff that those receipts were not issued by them,” an internal auditor said.
The auditor visited the school and became certain there had been forgery and manipulation to collect the amounts of money wrongly stated in the receipts.
“After a complaint was filed against her, the accused sent an email to the company owner, admitting to embezzlement and forgery and that her salary was not enough to make ends meet. She suggested several times to him to sort it out through a settlement.”
According to the auditor, the defendant’s wrongdoings had been going on since 2010 and up to January 2016 and they lodged a complaint at Bur Dubai police station.
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