The Cassation Court has upheld the reduced prison sentences of two civil servants who were last year found guilty of attempting to defraud the Social Insurance Fund (SIO) out of almost BD290,000.
The court heard that the Social Development Ministry employees tried to exploit a public scheme that supports small family businesses named ‘Khatwa’ through forgery.
‘Khatwa’, or the Productive Household Programme, supports low-income families to run home-based businesses by providing them with training and financial assistance.
In August 2024, the High Criminal Court sentenced the mastermind behind the operation to five years in prison, while her co-conspirator and supporter was sentenced to three years.
Upon appeal, however, the Supreme Criminal Appeals Court lowered the 31-year-old woman’s penalty from five years to three years.
The 48-year-old accomplice, a Productive Families Support Services supervisor, was jailed for abetting her in her illicit plans, but his term was slashed from three years to one year.
The court upheld the fines, BD278,163 and BD7,728, respectively, which the Bahraini employee and the supervisor were ordered to pay.
A third appellant, the duo’s 44-year-old boss, who was in charge of the support scheme, had received an 18-month jail term for allowing the fraud to happen through neglect, but it was reduced to 12 months.
Appeals judges also ruled to suspend her sentence for three years, beginning in October 2024, and further dropped a BD270,381 fine due to it being mistakenly assigned to her in the High Criminal Court’s prior ruling.
All of these amended sentences were upheld by Bahrain’s final court of appeal, the Cassation Court.
Although no charges were dropped by the appeals court, the jail time was lowered to a sentence that judges deemed more proportional to the crimes committed.
The GDN earlier reported that the first appellant committed fraud to buy end-of-service years from the SIO, undeservedly entitling her and her relatives to more than BD266,000 in pensions.
She also reportedly lied about being part of the productive families scheme, and included relatives on the paperwork who were too young to be eligible for it in the first place.
The second appellant, the Bahraini supervisor, is said to have ‘encouraged and directed her’, approving the paperwork that contained data contradictory to ministry records despite not being authorised to.
Meanwhile, the third appellant, a top ministry official, was found guilty of neglecting her job duties by signing off on the falsified documents without verifying the information they contained and unintentionally enabling her two subordinates’ actions.
Throughout her trials, the official maintained her innocence, and her defence argued that she was ‘new to the position and did not have much experience’.
The attorneys claimed that she had warned the higher-ups about some issues with the Khatwa programme and ways it could be exploited, but the warnings fell on deaf ears – loopholes that were later used by the two main suspects.
She once gave a speech before the court in an attempt to clear her name, stating that she was appointed to that role due to her diligence, hard work and dedication, having worked in the ministry for more than 15 years.
Prosecutors stated that the fraud was uncovered during a forensic audit of the Khatwa programme, when the National Audit Office found a discrepancy in documentation.
An internal inquest by the ministry found that there was no record for the first appellant’s family in the ministry’s records.
zainab@gdnmedia.bh
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