The Administration Court in the Bureau of Grievances here has acquitted a businessman of forgery charges leveled against him by a plaintiff, who was his business partner. The defendant had been accused of signing the minutes of a meeting on the plaintiff's behalf. The plaintiff claimed that the defendant had forged his signature and caused him to lose considerable amounts of money in several financial deals after his bank account was frozen. The defendant told the court that he and the plaintiff were partners in a company and that the plaintiff's son forced the administrative director to leave the company, after which he shut it down. The defendant and other partners held an emergency meeting in response to the actions of the plaintiff's son and decided to cancel the plaintiff's membership on the board of directors and replace him with another partner. The defendant told the court that the decision was approved by a majority of the members of the board of directors. “After that meeting, I inadvertently put my signature in the box specified for the complainant's signature,” the defendant told the court. “Realizing the mistake I had made, I immediately crossed out my signature and asked the secretary to bring another paper to sign it properly,” he added. “Then the properly-signed paper was sent to the concerned department within the company, which notified the bank that the board of directors had been changed.” However, the secretary sent the other paper with the crossed-out signature to the bank. “The paper had nothing to do with freezing the bank account of the plaintiff; it was a notification that changes were introduced to the board of directors,” he added. The defendant presented both minutes of that meeting and submitted bank documents that showed that the plaintiff's account was not frozen. Based on the defendant's statements and evidence, the judge acquitted him of the charges. Meanwhile, the Administrative Court in the Bureau of Grievances last week gave one-year prison sentences to three citizens and fined them. The first one was fined SR500 while the two others were fined SR3000 each. The citizens were charged with forgery of 15 construction licenses. The Labor Office reported the forged licenses when a citizen filed a recruitment visa request. Later, when an official from the Labor Office processed the transaction and looked into the documents, he came across the forgery. __
