A senior official holding the rank of Assistant Undersecretary, was arrested on charges of forging a work fingerprint. He was sentenced to 7 years in prison, and the same period was given to the Iranian, whose mission was to cover his profile. The court also obligated the undersecretary to return the 113 thousand dinars to the state.

The Assistant undersecretary was caught red-handed along with a number of other employees who continued to forge fingerprints. The fraud allowed them to avoid any deductions from their salaries.

Although the Assistant Undersecretary paid the entire amount of money owed to the state before the prosecution, the latter decided to refer him to the court, which issued a preliminary ruling imprisoning him, and required him to pay the aforementioned fine. It is expected that the ruling will be appealed before the rest of the levels of litigation.

The strangest thing is that this Assistant Undersecretary, since he was a director and then appointed assistant agent and assistant undersecretary in the principal position, has continued to engage in this forgery for many years, without his matter being exposed.

He also received an excellent work bonus for the past two years, 2021 and 2022, a large amount. He also received front-line bonuses during the “Corona” pandemic, as did tens of thousands of other undeserving employees, and on top of that, he chaired the committee examining requests for front-line bonuses.

This undersecretary’s issue raises a number of puzzling questions:

What prompted someone in his prestigious job to resort to this criminal method, just to avoid small deductions from his salary? How did he continue to follow this method for years without being exposed? How was he awarded a reward for excellent work, when he was often not at work? More importantly: How many instances of this agent are there in the various ministries?

There is no doubt that the absence of an element of morality in the state, in general, has become a phenomenon, which is what prompted this undersecretary, and thousands of other officials, to commit such crimes, and perhaps some of them subsequently assumed much higher positions, and thus became members of the Legislative Council!

The story of this person, and the coincidence factor in his exposure, reminded me of an anecdote I wrote years ago, about a lion that escaped from the zoo, and no trace of it was found for years. But his matter was revealed, due to a mistake he committed, and he was returned to the zoo, to spend the rest of his life in a small prison, far from the space of freedom that he had enjoyed.

After his escape, the lion took refuge in the municipality building and hid in the most backward and corrupt municipality department, the archives. The lion had to devour a few auditors and some archive employees, whose absence was never missed by anyone, either because what they were doing was not important, or because they were already part of the group that was content to leave the fingerprint and then return home.

The lion’s sin occurred during one of the long holidays, when there were neither auditors nor employees, and the active management staff was the first to show up for work that day, so the hungry lion proceeded to devour him.

The incident could have passed, like previous incidents, but the ‘farash’ was the only one who knew the location of any file in the archive, and his absence caused all municipal departments to be completely paralyzed.

Since the surveillance cameras showed that he entered the building and did not leave, he required the assistance of security and civil defense to search for him in the municipality’s basements, corridors and tunnels.

The result was the discovery of the lion, and he was returned to his prison in the garden. Had it not been for his sin, he would have remained in the archives, free until today!

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By Ahmad alsarraf