Friday, 14 May 2010

AlGosaibi v Maan AlSanea - Allegations of Forgery - Evidence Inconclusive?

Here's an article from the Gulf Daily News in which a forsenic expert is quoted as saying that it is not possible to determine if Sulayman AlGosaibi's signatures were forged or not.

There are a couple of interesting things about this report.

In  the NY Supreme Court Case (601650/2009), as part of a forum non conveniens argument, the attorney for Maan AlSanea submitted a  sworn statement by one of AlGosaibi's lawyers, Andrew John Ford, given in connection with the suit of British Arab Commercial Bank and others against AlGosaibi.  This is Document 107-2 (Exhibit 25), which you can access by going to the Supreme Court of New York's website, and undertaking an Index Search using the above case number (601650/2009)

Here's paragraph #13 of the Ford statement.
"AHAB says that this borrowing was obtained by the forgery of the signatures of the chairman of AHAB by or at the direction of Mr AI Sanea on hundreds of banking documents. It has submitted many of the  banking documents to forensic examination by Dr Audrey Giles, head of the Giles Document Laboratory  and formerly head of the Questioned Documents Section of the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory. Dr Giles' work has been hampered by the lack of original documents (many of which were  removed from the Money Exchange by Mr AI Sanea and which he has refused to return). Nevertheless she  has so far concluded that there is evidence that the signatures on at least 286 banking documents are not  genuine. On some documents, signatures have been applied by colour photocopying or by an inkjet printer and then traced over with a porous-tip pen; on others, the signatures are identical matches of those on  other documents and therefore highly unlikely to be genuine. In some cases the signatures were applied to  documents at a time when it would have been physically impossible for the purported author to have  signed because of incapacitating illness."
It's unclear if
  1. Based on additional work, Dr.  Giles has changed her earlier findings.  
  2. Or this refers solely to this particular batch of documents cited in the Gulf Daily News article.
Presumably, more information will be forthcoming.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

what she examined =on the algosaibi payroll=were not original documents.The ones she examined later were original and compared to hundreds supplied and verified as uncontestably real by the Saudi Goverment