School Principal allegedly embezzles $1.4 million in building funds together with mate

Publisher
News.com.au
Date published
December 2024

Police have arrested a high school principal and his brother in law on charges of embezzling $1.4 million of public funds earmarked for public school works. Rabieh Gharibeh and his brother-in-law Ahmed Charchouch, a building company director, allegedly stole the money from funds earmarked for school building upgrades through 86 separate invoices.

Mr Gharibeh allegedly pocketed $900,000 of the money, leaving Mr Charchouch the remaining $500,000.

The arrests follow extensive inquiries from Strike Force Heidi, which was established in 2024 by State Crime Command’s Financial Crime Squad, with assistance from the NSW Department of Education. The strike force was set up to investigate allegations made against the principal earlier this year, which led police to identify anomalies in his invoices.

Speaking at a press conference, Detective Superintendent Gordon Arbinja said the arrests were ordered ‘to prevent a further $165,000 worth of fraud that [police] were expecting as late as yesterday’. The Inquiry remains ongoing, and police expected to make further arrests in the future.

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Related fraudster personas

The Reckless

The Reckless acts without care, responsibility or regard to the consequences of their actions by disregarding requirements, procedures, warnings or directions to gain personal benefits.

The Organised

The Organised are groups which use a combination of methods in planned, coordinated and sophisticated ways to dishonestly gain benefits.

The Exploiter

The Exploiter uses something for a wrongful purpose to dishonestly gain personal benefits.

The Coercer

The Coercer influences, manipulates or bribes another person to act in a desired way to dishonestly gain personal benefits.

Related countermeasures

Collaborate with strategic partners

Collaborate with strategic partners such as other government entities, committees, working groups and taskforces. This allows you to share capability, information and intelligence and to prevent and disrupt fraud.

Staff and contractor rotation

Rotate staff and contractors in and out of roles to avoid familiarity. Staff and contractors can become too familiar with processes, customers or vendors, which can lead to insider threats.

Random allocation

Randomly allocate requests or claims to staff for processing. This removes the option for staff to select which claims to process.

Segregation of duties

Separate duties by allocating tasks and associated privileges for a business process to multiple staff. This is very important in areas such as payroll, finance, procurement, contract management and human resources. Systems help to enforce the strong separation of duties. This is also known as segregation of duties.

Public transparency

Publish information on your entity’s decision-making processes, decisions made, successful tenderers or grantees, incidents and breaches.

Reconcile records

Reconcile records to make sure that 2 sets of records (usually the balances of 2 accounts) match. Reconciling records and accounts can detect if something is different from what is standard, normal, or expected, which may indicate fraud.

Audits or reviews

Internal or external audits or reviews evaluate the process, purpose and outcome of activities. Clients, public officials or contractors can take advantage of weaknesses in government programs and systems to commit fraud, act corruptly, and avoid exposure.

Coordinate disruption

Coordinate disruption activities across multiple programs or entities to strengthen processes and identify serious and organised criminals targeting multiple programs. It can also include referrals to law enforcement agencies for those groups that reach the threshold for complex criminal investigations.

Investigate fraud

 Investigate fraud in line with the Australian Government Investigation Standards (AGIS).

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