Bahrain Mirror (Exclusive): The case of forged certificates in Kuwait triggered the public opinion in Bahrain in August to question the certificates of governmental officials and private sector employees.

It all started with the Bahraini Ambassador in Russia Ahmad Al-Saati. A full investigation showed that Al-Saati obtained a PhD in human rights on January 13, 2015 from a fake university claimed to be in the US.

CEO of Jafcon Akbar Jafari said that he told one of the officials that "there are numbers of high certificates holders who call themselves professors, but they hold no certificates because they are issued by fake universities."

Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, under pressure, on (August 19, 2018) called for an investigation into the information raised about forged certificates in Bahrain, where officials in his government were believed to be in involved in.

Khalifa bin Salman called on the High Education Council "to ensure that those who had obtained those degrees were not applying for jobs or nominated for new posts in their current work sites."

Commenting on the PM's directives, Education Minister Majed Al-Nuaimi said that "the National Committee for the evaluation of scientific qualifications didn't equalize any certificate granted by outside universities that do not meet all the requirements".

In the same context, Fawzi Al-Jowder, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education for Education Affairs and Curricula said that the committee directly refers any false or forged qualifications or those issued from fake institutions to legal parties in the country in order to investigate them.

The Ministry of Education once again said that it referred certificate forgers to the Public Prosecution. However, the Prosecution said that "it did not receive any reports about this incident for the time being and up until this date, no information was referred to the prosecution regarding any similar issue except one incident five years ago".

The Ministry of Education clearly appeared to be an insecure party to carry out the investigations. Besides, a former human resources official at a school said that he was dismissed from his work because he informed the Ministry of Education about the forgery of qualifications at the school where he worked.

New information revealed the involvement of government and private sector officials in forging certificates. Investigations also showed the involvement of MPs in purchasing certificates from fraudulent universities, including the so-called Dutch "Lahaye University".

Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education Mohammed bin Mubarak tried to steer attention away from the issue of forged certificates and said that it started when the Ministry refused to equalize a number of medicine certificates from universities in China.

Instead of investigating the fraudulent certificates obtained by government officials and private sector officials obtained from universities that do not exist, the ministry started to talk about the equivalence of scientific qualifications for newly graduated graduates in fields such as medicine.

The Ministry of Education has informed the Public Prosecution in the past years until February 2018 of attempts of a number of students to adopt procedures to obtain academic qualifications without meeting the required rules and terms, public prosecutor Ahmad Al-Hammadi said on the behalf of the prosecution.

A new investigation revealed that Ali Al-Nuaimi, the son of the Minister of Education, Majid Nuaimi, had a PhD from the Institute of Arab Research and Studies in Cairo, an institute which the ministry doesn't recognize. However, nothing happened.

It is true that pressure has continued on the government to take action against forgers, but it has refrained from doing so. Despite reports that a secretary in a service ministry (Mohammad Al-Ansari) was suspended from his job due to his involvement in forging his certificates, he soon returned to work.

After about a month, Bahraini newspapers said that the Bahraini Ambassador in Russia presented his credentials as a non-resident ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina. End of the news. It seems that the file was closed as other corruption files.

Arabic Version