Shamed for writing bad check

A Saudi national was publicly chastised by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in a local newspaper for writing a check that bounced.
The Ministry of Commerce named the Saudi defaulter as Fahad Saad Suleiman Al-Dosari in the advertisement entitled “Name and Shame” in an Arabic daily Wednesday following a verdict issued by a Saudi court, which had sentenced the defaulter to seven months in prison with a hefty fine.
The ministry official said that more Saudi nationals would be named as part of a new aggressive campaign to curb the phenomenon of bounced checks that has hit the Saudi economy.
“The plan is to deter this criminal offense and to ensure that people issue checks only when they have sufficient balance in their accounts,” said an official at the ministry.
“Such defaulters can be fined and even imprisoned,” said Abdul Qadeer Mirza, a top official at Banque Saudi Fransi.
The Ministry of Commerce and Industry, as well as other government agencies, have enacted legislation to curb this criminal practice and called for taking legal and public action against people found guilty of writing checks that bounce. The naming and shaming is part of the campaign and is published in local newspapers, which sell in the area in which the fraud occurred.
The newspaper report included the man’s identity number and the number of the court ruling. The Ministry of Commerce and Industry has warned that it would apply the Saudi Cabinet’s decision to take punitive action against issuing checks that bounce.
However, in a report released by the Saudi Credit Bureau (SCB), it was noted that Saudi Arabia has witnessed a 73 percent drop in the number of bounced checks issued since 2009.
The decline in the total value of bounced checks was even greater, falling to SR3.8 billion in 2012 from SR15bn in 2009, marking a decrease of 74.6 percent, according to the SIMAH report.
The report provided 35 reasons behind the phenomenon of bounced checks in Saudi Arabia, citing insufficient funds as the main reason.
Official Saudi statistics indicate that bad checks in the first quarter of 2011 represented payments worth SR1 billion, an impressive decrease from 2009, where 160,000 checks worth SR14 billion bounced.