Woman jailed for embezzlement

TDT | Manama

The First High Criminal Court sentenced a Bahraini woman to one year in jail and fined her BD1,000, after finding her guilty of using her mother in-law’s bank card without her consent. However, the court suspended the execution of the verdict for three years.

As reported on TDT last month, the case was initiated due to a dispute over the ownership rights of an abaya shop between the woman and her late husband’s parents. The woman, who is in her 20s, was accused by her in-laws of using their bank card without their consent.

According to the accused’s statements, the shop was bought by her late husband in 2017 and he had registered it under his mother’s name. She clarified that her late husband was a public employee, hence he wasn’t allowed to register the shop under his name, while also claiming that it wasn’t possible to register it under her name because she was a university student at the time, so the shop was registered under her mother-in-law’s name.

Explaining more, she said she was practically managing the shop since it was established, even before her husband’s demise. However, the plaintiff, the father-in-law, accused her of embezzling money from the shop by using its bank card and transferring amounts of up to BD5,000 to her personal account.

The accuser also claimed that he had agreed with his daughter-in-law to allocate BD200 out of the shop’s monthly income to her as a salary, while the remaining amounts should be deposited in the bank account registered under the shop’s name.

The man alleged that he discovered the matter last January when he received messages from the bank informing him about amounts being transferred from the shop’s account to the accused’s. Additionally, he accused his daughter-in-law of embezzling other amounts he is not aware of, as he said he had also discovered that she modified the settings of the card machine at the shop so it would automatically transfer amounts to her account.

The woman told the judges that she had multiple disagreements with her father-in-law, who she claimed repeatedly refused to waive the shop’s Commercial Registration and transfer it to her name, and instead demanded to be handed over all of the shop’s pages on social media, which have thousands of followers and customers.