KUWAIT CITY, July 2: The Criminal Court, chaired by Judge Al-Dhuwaihi Al-Dhuwaihi, sentenced an employee of the Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI) to five years in prison with hard labor and fined him KD 340 for bribery and forgery of official and electronic documents for changing the residential addresses of several expatriates in exchange for money. The court also sentenced a middleman and three expatriates to three years and four months in prison with hard labor and fined them double the amount of the bribes they received or facilitated. It ordered the deportation of the three expatriates upon completion of their prison term, while it acquitted 13 other defendants of all charges due to insufficient evidence. It also ordered the confiscation of the forged documents and the mobile phone used in the illegal activities. It set the fees for the two appointed lawyers for two of the defendants at KD50 each.
Case files indicated that from 2022 to 2025, the convicted employee abused his official position and entered false information into the PACI automated system, resulting in the falsification of registered residential addresses for several expatriates, and he received bribes in return. Investigations revealed that one of the defendants acted as an intermediary between the employee and other individuals, receiving the bribes and delivering them to the convicted employee. The court clarified that the fines were calculated according to Article 35 of Law No. 31/1970, which stipulates that the fine must be double the value of the bribe given or promised. Accordingly, the court fined the convicted employee KD340, the mediator KD80, KD130 each for the other defendants and KD80 for a female defendant