The Criminal Court of Kuwait sentenced an employee at the General Traffic Department in the Ministry of Interior to 10 years in prison in absentia and fined him 200,000 Kuwaiti dinars for embezzling public money.
Case files indicate that the employee, who is currently outside the country, embezzled 68,000 Kuwaiti dinars as he collected fines for traffic violations and deposited the collected amount into his personal account instead of the ministry’s account.
According to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas, “such a case and others reveal a major defect that must be remedied, which is allowing amounts to be collected manually rather than electronically, in addition to the weakness of permanent control over public money.”
In May, the Criminal Court of Kuwait issued its ruling on a case of embezzlement committed by the director of one of the major companies in which the state has a specified stake.
Al-Qabas said that the Criminal Court ruled to imprison the director of one of the major companies in which the state contributes 25 percent for 5 years, obligating them to return the embezzled amount of 150,000 dinars, and fining them twice, with a stay of execution on a bail of 1,000 Kuwaiti dinars until the appeal.
In 2020, the Kuwaiti Criminal Court issued an order imprisoning officials and government employees affiliated with the Ministries of Health and Endowments, fining them massive sums, and dismissing them from public office, based on their conviction of seizing public funds worth more than 9 million dinars (more than $29 million).
