like many others, i in my life have met many people of my generation some of them older than me and others younger and i have learned a lot from them.
my grandfather and my father are responsible for shaping personality, instilling in my ethics and teaching me how to conduct business deals. i was also glad to meet my father’s companions such as m a h m o u d a l - a w a d i, a h m a d a l - s h u m a i s, captain falah al-samdan and ibrahim bu quraish.
i have always had the happiness to see abdul mohsen muzaffar, samir rahal, hisham al-sultan, najeeb al humaidhi, hassan khaja, and others accompanying me. my work at the bank also allowed me to meet distinguished personalities such as late ali al-bahar (bu marzouk) and jassem al-wazzan (bu khaled), in addition to nuri musaed al-saleh, yaqoub al-jou’an, who became my life friend, and other loved ones, including but not only ali ahmad al-jabr, the ambassadors abed al-hamid al-baijan and jassim buresli, and those whom i do not remember due to my old age.
i do not claim honor, honesty, and straightforwardness. false pride is not my cup of tea, but i admit that i was affected by the good qualities of all these people, and how they helped me shape my life, but, for reasons related only to the curiosity of the journalist or a novelist, i hope that i feel or know the truth about the feelings of the impostors and fraudsters.
do they really think of the consequences of what they are doing or will do? what if they get exposed, do they have an alternative plan? what about financial fines, the hypothesis of imprisonment, and offense to personal and family reputation?
the relationship between this introduction and the topic of this article may be difficult to explain, but i feel there is some connection:
“a.m.”, a wealthy citizen who previously held senior positions and belongs to a well-known family, was involved in a forgery, which is the largest and strongest of its kind in the history of one of the institutions most accused of corruption, which is the municipality.
“a.m.” owns land in salmiya. in 2004, he obtained a permit to build a 20-story hotel on an area totaling 24,000 square meters.
the contractor completed the construction, the project owner got approvals from all the concerned authorities and the ministry of electricity gave power supply to the building.
sometime later, the owner submitted a request to the municipality minister for his approval to obtain a ‘duplicate’ building permit since the original was lost. the minister agreed to his request because of his social and financial standing.
without going into the details, let me disclose that director-general of the kuwait municipality engineer ahmad al-manfouhi, discovered from the request of a lost document, that ‘a.m.’ and his son had forged all the supervision documents in the municipality including that of power supply to the building, and the building permit. they had also falsified the signature of all relevant government agencies in order to conceal a serious building violation.
the matter was referred to the court and a verdict was issued against the three parties to the case. they appealed the verdict, and the cassation court looked into the case but the three courts agreed to convict them not only because of the adequacy of evidence but also because of the weird scale of the violation.
the original, alleged lost license was issued on the basis of a building of 24,000 square meters. as for the violation, it was not one thousand or two thousand meters, for example, not even ten or twenty thousand square meters, but was up to 35,000 square meters, and this is what did not happen, not at the time of the swindler bernard l. madoff or the time of qais ibn al-mallouh.
i return and say how can a person commit such a vicious and unique violation in its insolence in the history of the municipality, and does not show any interest in the matter? hence my desire to reincarnate his personality even for a few moments, to know the truth of what he was feeling while he was doing this. am i to be blamed for my curiosity?