Man in court for endorsing Dh697,000 dud cheques

Emaduddin Khalil, Staff Reporter

The Abu Dhabi Court of Appeal heard on Thursday a case involving an Asian charged with endorsing five dud cheques worth Dhs697,000 in four separate incidents.

The defendant reportedly endorsed two cheques valuing Dhs375,000 in total to a person on the basis that he had existing and withdrawable sufficient fund in his account.

He also endorsed another dud cheque worth Dhs45,000 to a contracting company, a fourth dud cheque worth Dhs132,000 and a fifth one worth Dhs145,000 to another contracting company.

During the hearing, the defendant confessed to endorsing the cheques, saying, “I was unable to provide sufficient balance for those cheques”

He begged the Court to be clement and merciful to him and to commute the verdict. The Court decided to postpone the verdict in the four cases for Wednesday’s hearing on 21 August.

Recently, the Dubai Criminal Court sentenced an Arab customer service employee, 42, working in a bank to 10 years in jail and fined him Dhs1 million to be followed by deportation after being convicted of forging a cheque in the name of a bank customer using a volatile ink to liquidate a Dhs1 million deposit and hence stealing the money from the customer’s account and running away.

According to the victim’s testimony, he received a phone call from the defendant telling him that his Dhs1 million deposit generated profits of Dhs1,850 and that he would have to liquidate the deposit in order to add the profit to it.

The following day, the victim visited the bank where the defendant worked and met the defendant in his office who explained everything to him in detail. The defendant told the victim that he would have to sign two cheques, one in the amount of the deposit and the other in the amount of the profit. The victim gave two blank cheques to the defendant who filled out the data with a pen that was later found to contain a volatile ink that would vanish after a while.

The defendant photocopied the two cheques and gave the victim copies of them. Later, the victim received a message that the profits was deposited in his account.