One: False Work Absence

Summary: Al-Mulla fired me on 15 January 2009 then, on 17 February 2009 they filed a complaint against me with the Ministry of Social Affairs, saying I had been absence from work since 15 January. The same senior employee at Al-Mulla, Isam Al-Othman head of Employee Affairs at Al-Mulla, signed and personally handed me my dismissal notice on 15 January, and signed and filed the complaint of work absence a month later.

Why did they do this? To get me deported.

On 15 January 2009, I was fired from my job at Al-Mulla. My manager Nazih had threatened this if I testified in the Ayad case. The official reason for my dismissal was that I was no longer needed.

A few weeks later, walking around a shopping area in Kuwait, I ran into someone I used to think was a friend at Al-Mulla, an in-house lawyer called Samy Thabet Hamdan. He warned me that Al-Mulla had made a work absence complaint against me. (In Kuwait, if a non-citizen is absent from work without excuse for a certain time, the employer can make such a complaint.) I was shocked because this made no sense because I was fired. How can I be absent from a job I did not have?

I asked at government offices and discovered that indeed, on 17 February 2009, Al-Mulla had made a formal complaint against me for work absence. The person at Al-Mulla who had signed the complaint was Isam Al-Osman, head of Employee Affairs, and the same person who had signed my letter of dismissal and handed to me in person on 15 January. One month later, he had signed a work absence complaint, saying I had been absent from work since 15 January.

As a result of the false work absence complaint, I was arrested twice in May and June 2009. Both arrests were illegal. Al-Mulla used their corrupt influence with the police (purchased by bribes as I describe in one case at the start of the story) and not only was I targeted and arrested twice, but was also imprisoned in solitary confinement without any charge and without being allowed to call my lawyer or family.

By locking me up in this way, Al-Mulla hoped I would run out of time to expose the false work absence complaint and so be deported. But, I was lucky and had a friend who knew a senior official who stopped the illegal arrest. I was able to get out, expose the fraud by Al-Mulla and transfer my residency.