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A 70-year-old business owner who was sentenced to a year in prison for forging a former employee’s signature on a contract has lost his appeal.
The court heard that he forged the young man’s signature to make it appear that he was working full-time for the company, even though he had been fired after three months for being ‘unsuitable for the job’.
The 25-year-old victim was officially listed as employed in Social Insurance Organisation (SIO) records, something he discovered only when he applied for unemployment benefits and was told he was ineligible.
In August, the elderly owner of the cargo handling company was found guilty of falsifying a signature on the contract and then submitting the document to the SIO and the Labour Ministry, knowing it was false.
The High Criminal Court sentenced him to a year in prison, ordered the confiscation of the documents bearing the forged signatures and granted the victim his request to sue the man for damages in the civil courts.
The Bahraini then took his case to the Supreme Criminal Appeals Court to contest the verdict, with his lawyer asking judges to replace the prison sentence with an alternative penalty such as community service – but the appeal was rejected.
The GDN previously reported that the incident took place in 2022, when the appellant was 66 and the victim was 21, but the case has only now come before the courts.
The 25-year-old former employee testified that he went to the Labour Ministry to apply for unemployment assistance when he was informed that he was insured under a company.
He claimed that he lost access to his late father’s pension because he was registered with the SIO as a driver earning a monthly salary of BD300 under an open-ended contract.
Meanwhile, the appellant’s attorney previously stated that his client did not even know the ‘victim’, as more than 150 people worked for his company.
The defence stated that the appellant signed the contract as part of routine paperwork and that the process of submitting documents to government systems and registering employees was done by the human resources department.
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