School funds stolen

TDT | Manama

Email: mail@newsofbahrain.com

The First High Criminal Court has commenced the trial of an employee at the Ministry of Education, along with two Asian nationals, on charges of embezzling and facilitating the embezzlement of public funds by falsifying and manipulating data in the ministry’s electronic system and using forged documents.

The defendants denied the charges during their court appearance, while the court scheduled the next hearing for September 29.

Audits

The case originated from financial and administrative audits conducted by the Ministry of Education in 2024 on public schools, which revealed financial irregularities related to invoices and expenses at a government school.

An investigative committee was formed and concluded that fraudulent and tampered invoices, suspected to be invalid, had been used over five academic years from 2019–2020 until 2023–2024.

The committee found that some invoices were issued by shops that had already cancelled their commercial registrations, while others had been fabricated using Microsoft Word, without official approval or tax details.

Payments

In addition, there were financial receipts without signatures from recipients, and most payments were made in cash after deliberately splitting invoices to avoid issuing cheques as required by ministry regulations.

It was determined that the first defendant, an employee at the school, was responsible for these irregularities.

Investigations also uncovered discrepancies between genuine invoices issued by suppliers and the forged versions kept at the school, where the amounts in the originals were lower, with the difference allegedly pocketed by the third defendant.

Transactions

Furthermore, 13 invoices were cancelled, and 46 transactions were linked to a contracting, cleaning, and maintenance company that was formally owned by the first defendant’s wife but effectively managed by him, with no evidence of actual goods or services provided to the school.

During questioning by the Public Prosecution, the first defendant admitted agreeing with the second defendant to issue false invoices for goods and services never supplied to the school, claiming he used the funds to pay wages for workers he had hired personally.

He further admitted managing the contracting company’s commercial registration in his wife’s name and receiving some of the funds disbursed from the school’s budget based on those invoices.

Invoices

The second defendant confessed to falsifying invoices at the first defendant’s request, including preparing duplicate invoices with identical details and providing fictitious invoices to enable the disbursement of school funds without supplying any actual goods.

The third defendant stated that he had asked the first defendant for manual payment of his wages, and was instructed to provide invoices reflecting items or rentals that were never delivered, equivalent to the value of his wages.

The Public Prosecution charged the first defendant, as a financial and administrative employee at the school, with unlawfully embezzling BD5,448.130 from the school’s budget by exploiting his position and issuing payments based on fake invoices.

He was also accused of facilitating the third defendant’s unlawful receipt of BD153.496, and of inputting false data into the Ministry of Education’s electronic system with the intent of presenting it as legitimate information, thereby committing electronic record forgery and using forged documents knowingly.

The second defendant was charged with assisting the first defendant by supplying forged invoices and participating in falsifying invoice data, while the third defendant was charged with providing fake invoices for items never supplied to the school, in order to unlawfully obtain funds.