A C.I.D. investigator was left egg-faced yesterday after putting the wrong date on an arrest warrant for a woman accused of stealing around £19,000 from the company she works for.
As a result of the mistake, the judge had no choice but to release the woman with the investigation still in its early stage.
The suspect, a 20-year-old Nicosia woman, was the manager of a popular clothes shop which is part of a chain of shops owned by a company.
The woman was brought in for questioning on Tuesday and arrested on suspicion of stealing £18,816,94 from the company owner who noticed the massive shortfall in earnings between April 2006 and December 2006 at one of their Nicosia outlets.
She was rearrested yesterday morning at 10am but the investigator accidentally wrote May 15 on the warrant expiry date instead of May 16.
The judge who signed the arrest warrant in the morning also didn’t notice the date.
When the police arrived later in the day with a remand request of four days, they were horrified to discover the mistake on the arrest warrant.
Judge Alexia Lycourgou ordered a short recess for the investigator to rectify the problem with the judge who had signed the warrant in the morning.
But the judge refused to resign it telling the police that they would have to bring him a new warrant to sign, something they did not have enough time to do.
Judge Lycourgou then had no choice but to reject the police’s request for a remand and the woman walked out of the court along with her father and lawyer.
According to police, the woman had not been depositing the total amount of daily earnings at the bank.
After carefully combing the company books, the owner’s suspicions pointed towards the 20-year-old and she was called to his office to explain herself.
But she claimed that was depositing all of the money and said that she even had the receipts to prove it.
When the owner requested to see the receipts, she said she had them at home and would go and pick them up for him.
But when he tried to call her later that day, her phone was switched off.
He eventually telephoned her the next day at his shop where she told him that her mother had thrown away the receipts.
That same day, she placed the shop key under the till and walked out, never to be seen again by the company owner.
Police investigators later found out that during the time of the theft, the suspect was buying large amounts of lavish items such as Gucci watches, clothes, furniture and jewelry despite earning a monthly salary of just £470.
During the last three weeks, she had also opened up a clothes shop of her own in Pallouriotissa and when asked by investigators where she had found the money to open up a shop she replied that her money had given her capital to open it up.
On Tuesday night, the suspect eventually confessed to stealing some money from the till and was yesterday brought before the court where she released an hour later.
