DUBAI: The Dubai Criminal Court yesterday sentenced two former Nakheel executives to three years each for bribery in the emirate's second ruling in ongoing real estate related corruption cases.
A former sales manager was also sentenced to three years last week for collecting AED17 million in unlawful commissions. The man was also fined AED17 million and ordered to repay the commission money.
The two Nakheel executives, who pleaded not guilty and claimed they were being framed, were accused of taking AED5.14 million in bribe money to finalize the sale of a property. The two accused are W.J., a 32-year-old Emirati general sales manager, and K.M., a 28-year-old Egyptian sales executive. The court ordered the Egyptian sales executive to be deported after his sentence.
A Nakheel sales consultant testified against the duo during the court proceedings, saying that K.M. informed him that W.J. had a plot of land on the waterfront, which he would sell to a buyer for a 2 percent commission to be paid in cash.
The witness then said that he informed the Dubai World's management about the two and they opened an investigation into the issue. The management asked him to play along with the two and find him a buyer for the plot of land. After a few days, the deal was done and the two received the money.
Meanwhile, a finance manager's dream of striking it rich quickly through an illicit way ended up in him being arrested after he fell victim to a group of African con-artists. According to Dubai Police, the manager had been tricked into giving money to the crooks thinking he was exchanging the amount for dollars at a much lower rate than the market value for the currency.
The crooks, through two Arab middlemen, had informed the manager that they wanted to exchange one million dollar to dirhams but they did not want to do it legally. So he agreed to exchange AED2.6 million for the one million dollars. The official exchange rate for one dollar is AED3.6 and the manager thought that he was going to make a profit of AED 1 million. The manager, a Tunisian, worked for a company whose Algerian owners were based outside the country and trusted him with running the company. He took the money without informing anybody and went to meet the middlemen and the Africans at around 8:30 p.m. on the 12th of May. The police managed to retrieve most of the money but the manager was not so lucky for he was charged with breaking of trust and is under arrest awaiting a trial.
