Derek Achong

A busi­ness­man from west Trinidad has been grant­ed $200,000 bail af­ter ap­pear­ing in court charged with us­ing a forged val­u­a­tion re­port to al­leged­ly cheat the Board of In­land Rev­enue (BIR) out of $88,750 in stamp du­ty.

Elias Moses, of West­moor­ings, was grant­ed bail af­ter ap­pear­ing in the Port-of-Spain Mag­is­trate’s Court on Wednes­day charged with ut­ter­ing a forged doc­u­ment and with seek­ing to cheat the BIR.

Moses was not called up­on to plead to the charges, which were laid in­dictably.

Ac­cord­ing to the charges, Moses is ac­cused of pre­sent­ing the al­leged fraud­u­lent doc­u­ment to the BIR’s Stamp Du­ty Sec­tion in Feb­ru­ary 2021, when he went to pay the stamp du­ty on a $2.6 mil­lion prop­er­ty in Point Cumana he pur­chased.

The re­port in­di­cat­ed that the prop­er­ty was classed as res­i­den­tial mean­ing that he owed $93,250 in stamp du­ty.

It was lat­er dis­cov­ered that the re­port was not pro­duced by the val­u­a­tion firm, whose let­ter­head was used, and that the prop­er­ty was ac­tu­al­ly classed as com­mer­cial mean­ing that he should have paid $182,000 in stamp du­ty.

BIR le­gal con­sul­tant Evans Welch did not ob­ject to bail for Moses.

As part of the con­di­tions of his bail, Moses was or­dered to re­port to the Four Roads Po­lice Sta­tion once week­ly for the du­ra­tion of his case.

Moses, who was rep­re­sent­ed by Ravi Ra­j­coomar, SC, is sched­uled to reap­pear in court on May 31.

Crim­i­nal tax in­ves­ti­ga­tor Adesh Ramdeo laid the charges.