Tahniah diucapkan atas kejayaan Puan Hajah Mariam Aziz di mahkamah
The ex-wife of the Sultan of Brunei won a High Court action yesterday against her former bodyguard, who is alleged to have stolen rare diamonds valued at £12 million and replaced them with cheap replicas.
Mariam Aziz, 55, sued Fatimah Kumin Lim, 34, when she discovered that a diamond bracelet and two diamond rings had been taken from her home in Kensington, west London, without permission.
The court heard that Lim originally admitted stealing the gems but later said the confession had been "forced" out of her, claiming instead that Mrs Aziz had asked her to sell the diamonds on her behalf to enable her to repay gambling debts.
Following a three-day hearing, Mr Justice Lindblom rejected Lim's "contradictory" and "fanciful" tales, which he described as "simply not capable of belief".
He agreed that it was "bordering on the absurd" to suggest that Mrs Aziz, an immensely wealthy woman, would need to sell the diamonds to meet the alleged £820,000 debt.
Mrs Aziz was given the two diamonds by the sultan, one of the world's richest men whom she married in 1981 and with whom she has four children. One, pear-shaped and vivid blue, was worth an estimated £8 million and the other, rectangular and yellow, worth about £600,000. She employed Lim when she and the sultan divorced in 2003, initially as her badminton coach but later as a bodyguard and personal assistant.
The court heard that Lim sold one of Mrs Aziz's diamond bracelets in 2008, with the parties disagreeing on whether she had permission to do so.
The following year, Lim persuaded her employer's adopted daughter, Afifa Abdullah, 26, to lend her the diamonds, claiming that she needed to show them to an investor to conclude a property deal, it was alleged.
Instead, she took them to a jeweller and asked him to make replicas.
She returned the jewels as promised but asked to borrow them again four months later and this time gave back the imitations, selling the originals in Geneva.
Mrs Aziz said she noticed something was wrong only when she sent one of the rings to be resized and was told it was a fake. The disclosure left her "panicking and really worried", the court heard.
When Miss Abdullah realised what might have happened, she sent Lim a text telling her that the diamonds were being checked. The bodyguard responded saying: "Please don't tell mama or I'll go to jail", it was claimed.
Giving evidence, Mrs Aziz admitted that she enjoyed gambling and that the sums involved may seem "obscene" to many people. She said she usually got chips worth £50,000 and bet around £10,000 a spin. Any sums she owed were repaid "promptly".
Miss Abdullah admitted she had been "naive" in lending the jewels to Lim but said that at the time she had trusted her. "She was like my best friend," she told the court.
The court heard that Lim told the jeweller that her mother had been given the diamonds by Mrs Aziz as a retirement present but Mrs Aziz said she had never employed the woman.
Mr Justice Lindblom said that if Mrs Aziz had wanted to sell her diamonds, he could see no reason why she would not have done so in the normal way, rather than "secretly" through Lim.
"There is no obvious reason for the claimant to have engaged in the charade of having the diamonds copied and replacing them in the rings with replicas," he said.
The judge ruled against Lim on the claims over the bracelet and the diamonds, dismissing her version of events. He ordered her to pay Mrs Aziz the full value of the bracelet but stayed proceedings on the diamonds pending the outcome of ongoing legal action in Switzerland, where Mrs Aziz is attempting to recover the jewels from the company that purchased them from Lim.
Lim, who is based in Singapore, did not attend the trial and was not represented by lawyers.
She has been made the subject of a worldwide order freezing her assets.
Dipetik dari - Telegraph
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--> Bodyguard of ex wife of Sultan of Brunei 'stole £12million in jewels and replaced them with worthless fakes'
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