Three cashiers of Fairway Super Market are on trial for allegedly stealing over GH¢1million and deleting the invoices from the point of sale (POS) machines.
The accused persons are Priscilla Ocean Azadegbe, 25, Blessed Dogbe, 33, and Esther Baba, 25. The trio has been charged with stealing before an Accra Circuit Court, but they all pleaded not guilty.
According to the charges, between January to April 2023, Priscilla misappropriated GH¢183,778.06, and Blessed also within the same period misappropriated GH¢118,791.55, while between February and April this year, Esther also stole GH¢33,685.05.
The court, presided over by His Honour Joojo Amoah Hagan, admitted Priscilla to GH¢200,000 bail with one surety to be justified by landed property; Blessed, GH¢150, 000 to be justified by one surety, and Esther, GH¢40,000 with one surety to be justified.
BRIEF FACTS
According to the prosecuting officer, Inspector Dzigbodi Nego, the complainant in the case is Prince Nii Tackie, Human Resource Manager of Fairway Super Market. He said Priscilla, Blessed and Esther reside at Teshie, La Adzeman and La Birthday respectively.
Insp. Nego told the court that on May 5, 2023, the complainant reported to the police that the management of the supermarket, after taking stock, detected that over GH¢1,000,000 was missing from their records between August 2022 and April 2023.
The prosecutor added that management, therefore, resorted to analysing the CCTV cameras installed at the supermarket to ascertain the cause of those losses. It was during this process that management saw the accused persons stealing various sums of money on a daily basis.
As a result, the accused persons were arrested, and during investigation, they admitted stealing some of the money, but not the amount being put out by management. They were later granted police enquiry bail while investigations continued.
It was discovered that the accused persons deleted invoices on the POS machine that corresponded to the amount they steal on each occasion.
Therefore, it was detected that in the month of January 2023, invoices with a face value of GH¢139,575.03 were deleted from the various POS machines being operated by the accused persons.
For instance, in February 2023, invoices with a face value of GH¢84,576 were deleted, as well as from March to April 2023 invoices with face values of GH¢158,026 and GH¢159,466 were respectively deleted.
Meanwhile, the accused persons could not account for these monies running to the tune of GH¢541,643.03 within the four months period. The accused persons were later discovered to have stolen the various sums and saved some on their mobile wallets and bank accounts.
The court was told that efforts were underway to get more information about those accounts and retrieve the monies from them.
