A former company director serving a two-year jail term for defrauding the government has been released on bail awaiting his appeal after a High Court judge found a “fundamental failure” in FICAC’s prosecution case.
Abdul Shariff was jailed by the Suva Magistrate’s Court last month on a charge of obtaining financial advantage in 2010.
Court records showed that Shariff and fellow company director Rajniel Anitma Wati, the owners of a business called Mass Stationery Supplies, colluded with Public Works Department employees by providing false quotations, invoices, and delivery dockets across four transactions. They then received full payment totalling $10,557.50 for items that were never delivered.
Shariff, who had served 36 days in prison, applied for bail pending his appeal, raising nine grounds challenging his conviction and four grounds challenging his sentence.
In a February 27 ruling, Justice Pita Bulamainaivalu found that the appeal against conviction and sentence was highly likely to succeed due to FICAC’s fundamental failure to specify in the statement of offence that the charge was a “representative count”, rendering the charge defective.
The judge also found that the magistrate in the case had not properly applied the “accomplice warning” when considering the evidence of Shariff’s alleged accomplice, Laisa Seniloli Halafi, who has been serving a 10-year prison sentence since 2017 for abuse of office.
The “accomplice warning” requires a court to consider the risks of convicting a person on the evidence of an accomplice.
Halafi had testified in support of the charges against Shariff.
Justice Bulamainaivalu said the magistrate found Halafi’s evidence credible and reliable, concluding there was no risk that she would attempt to shift blame onto Shariff or the other accused for her own benefit. He said the magistrate had not properly applied the required accomplice warning.
He said that accomplice Sitiveni Tuiguru, a PWD employee who was given immunity by FICAC did not provide the relevant immunity letter but instead, he produced a copy of a letter for a different criminal case.
The judge ruled that, if Tuiguru was immunised from prosecution, the magistrate failed to properly warn herself of the danger of convicting based on the evidence of an immunised accomplice unless that evidence was corroborated.
He also ruled that the magistrate failed to adequately reduce Shariff’s sentence to account for the 11-year delay in the determination of his case.
