- Fatimah Lim was accused of stealing two gems and a bracelet worth £12m
- But she insisted she sold them on behalf of her employer Mariam Aziz
- She claimed Aziz needed the money to pay off huge gambling debts
- Court heard Ms Aziz once blew £500,000 in casinos in a single night
- Lim said Aziz wanted replicas so she could hide her gambling addiction
- Jury at Isleworth Crown Court took nearly 15 hours to find Lim not guilty
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| Cleared: Fatimah Lim, left, had denied stealing diamonds worth £12m from Mariam Aziz, right, the former wife of the world's richest man, the Sultan of Brunei |
Fatimah Lim, 35, a Commonwealth Games badminton silver medallist, took the gems while working as Mariam Aziz’s bodyguard and jetted off to Geneva to sell them to a diamond merchant for over $7m.
She sold a 12.71 carat blue diamond, worth £7.6million, and 27.1 carat yellow diamond, worth £600,000 and replaced them with duplicates made out of glass and mineral tanzanite.
But Lim insisted that she sold the diamonds on behalf of her employer Ms Aziz who had asked her to do so secretly as she needed the cash to pay off her debts.
Lim said her then boss racked up huge debts at some of London’s top casinos and wanted replicas made so she could hide her gambling addiction from the Bruneian Royal Family.
Ms Aziz, 59, once blew £500,000 in one night gambling in the capital and would often take her entourage to swanky casinos in London, Singapore, and Macau, the court heard.
Lim had also been accused of stealing a diamond bracelet belonging to Ms Aziz, worth around £3.3m and bought from Graff jewellers in Bond Street.
But a jury at Isleworth Crown Court took nearly 15 hours to find Lim not guilty of three counts of theft.
Lim had been tempted into a gambling lifestyle by Ms Aziz after she persuaded her team of female Muslim bodyguards to play the tables, despite their faith.
Jurors heard that the Bruneian royal would each provide them with gambling chips worth up to £3,000 a time.
Lim’s gambling credit was eventually increased from £3,000 to £1.5m because of her association with Ms Aziz, the court was told.
She told jurors she had to sell the diamonds in secret because Ms Aziz did not want the Sultan’s family to know of her crazed gambling sprees.
Lim, from Singapore, said: ‘I was in the casino car, the chauffeur driven car given by casinos to assist Ms Aziz to travel to and from the casinos.
‘At that time I was sitting in the back with Ms Aziz, she said she wanted to sell jewellery.
‘I looked at her and she took out two bracelets and she said that she wanted me to sell them for her’.
She continued: ‘At that time she was owing to casinos £800,000. She told me that I could find any buyer that was sufficient to pay her gambling debts.
‘I agreed to it because the jewellery belongs to Ms Aziz and she has the right to sell whatever she wanted so I just did whatever I was instructed.
‘Ms Aziz said I couldn’t say it belonged to her. I asked who I can say these items belong to and she says "say it belongs to your mother”.
Lim had the real diamonds replicated by a jeweller in London’s famous Hatton Garden after providing him with a forged letter stating they were a gift from Ms Aziz to her mother, for 28 years of service as her PA.
The gems were eventually sold to a buyer in Switzerland for close to £5m - around the same sum as Lim claimed her then boss owed to London casinos.
She was confronted for the thefts by Ms Aziz’s nephew Idris Ja’afar in Brunei where she was arrested on January 3, 2010.
Just hours after the badminton star had been released on bail by local detectives Mr Ja’afar secretly recorded his meeting with Lim - in which she made a full confession.
But Lim told jurors that she had been forced into a false confession by corrupt detectives and made a ‘scapegoat’ by the Bruneian Royal Family.
Sumber - Mail Online
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