Woman granted $6m bail in alleged $20m fraud case

A woman ac­cused of par­tic­i­pat­ing in an al­leged TT$20 mil­lion fraud­u­lent cheque scheme has been grant­ed TT$6 mil­lion bail and or­dered to sur­ren­der her pass­port pend­ing the out­come of court pro­ceed­ings.

Jack­qui Wat­son, for­mer­ly Wat­son-Vin­cent, ap­peared be­fore Mas­ter Abra­ham on June 22 and was grant­ed bail with sure­ty. The mat­ter was ad­journed to No­vem­ber 5 for a sta­tus hear­ing, while a suf­fi­cien­cy hear­ing is sched­uled for No­vem­ber 10.

Ac­cord­ing to a press re­lease by the TTPS, Wat­son was charged fol­low­ing an in­ves­ti­ga­tion by the Fraud Squad and the Spe­cial In­ves­ti­ga­tions Unit in­to the de­posit of a pur­port­ed TT$20 mil­lion Gov­ern­ment cheque in­to a com­pa­ny ac­count at a com­mer­cial bank.

In­ves­ti­ga­tors al­lege the cheque, which ap­peared to have been is­sued by the Cen­tral Bank of Trinidad and To­ba­go, was lat­er de­ter­mined to be fraud­u­lent. Be­fore the dis­crep­an­cy was de­tect­ed, more than TT$18 mil­lion was re­port­ed­ly with­drawn or oth­er­wise re­moved from the ac­count.

Wat­son was ar­rest­ed on June 18 and, fol­low­ing le­gal con­sul­ta­tions, was charged on June 20 with one count of ob­tain­ing mon­ey by false pre­tence in­volv­ing TT$20 mil­lion and one count of mon­ey laun­der­ing.