An employee holding a high-level administrative position in a private company in the Eastern Province is currently being tried for allegedly accepting bribe to award a SR150 million contract to a construction company, Al-Hayat newspaper reported Monday quoting court sources.
The employee has not been identified.
Sources said the summary circuit of the Administrative Court in Dammam has taken testimonies of three immediate superiors of the employee who all maintained that the suspect was of established integrity and the case against him was only a frame-up.
The officials said the owner of the contract winning company was just being vindictive and was bent on taking action against the suspect for objecting to his request for 400 foreign work visas.
The sources said the owner of the construction company informed the security authorities that the employee was accepting bribes to place offers on construction companies. He then asked the employee to meet him at a certain place to sort out their personal differences.
When the employee arrived at the designated place, the informant got into his car and dropped an amount of SR200,000 near his feet. Security forces, who were waiting nearby, immediately approached the car and seized the money. The employee was arrested and charged with accepting bribes.
The witnesses told the court that the complainant approached their company to get an approval for 400 work visas but the company agreed to sanction him only 70 visas. The witnesses also said the complainant then became revengeful because the employee had sent him a letter accusing his company of substandard performance and threatening to nullify its contract.
Omar Al-Tamimi, the defendant’s lawyer, said the court turned down his repeated requests to grant bail to the accused.
He said the Bureau of Investigation and Public Prosecution (BIP) charged his client with accepting the bribe and presented the court with an audio recording containing an inaudible conversation between the defendant and the complainant. “The recording of the conversation is not an evidence before the court and the claim that he was caught red-handed accepting the bribe was a false accusation,” he said.
The lawyer said his client only nominates companies and is not responsible for awarding of contracts.
Source: saudigazette
