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Dublin Circuit Criminal Court Suspends Imprisonment Sentence of Two Men Who Stole €18,000 from the Expo Casino

Two former casino workers who stole almost €18,000 from a roulette table and a fruit machine at the Expo Casino have avoided going to jail as the court imposed suspended sentences.

The 47-year-old Tayab Kourtishe and the 41-year-old Jagjeet Singh were captured on CCTV footage while interfering with the fruit machine and manipulating the roulette table. The two men manipulated the roulette table by removing its glass cover and placing a ball on a number before playing it. By doing that, they tricked the machine into registering the already inserted ball as a win and give them a payout.

As shared with the prosecutor Antonia Boyle BL by garda Brian McCormack, the method used by Singh and Kourtishe to manipulate the fruit machine and steal from the casino involved the assistance of a third individual, who is not yet taken to court. According to evidence presented by McCormack, the third person involved in the scheme inserted a large number of €50 notes into the fruit machine and then pressed a payout button. This action made the machine generate a ticket to allow the individual to cash it in to get back the money they had loaded into the machine minutes ago.

After that, Mr. Kourtishe was caught on CCTV footage while unlocking the electronic gaming machine by using a key he had taken from the office premises at the casino to take all the cash previously inserted in the terminal by the third person. After that, Mr. Singh made sure he cleared all the transactions on the machine by deleting the terminal’s statistics and removing the records of the loaded €50 notes.

The Men Manipulated Roulette Table and Fruit Machine to Steal the Money

Both Jagjeet Singh and Tayab Kourtishe pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to charges of theft from the Expo Casino in September 2017. Neither one has any previous convictions.

Garda McCormack revealed to the court that Mr. Singh stole a total of €8,988 from the fruit machine, while the amount stolen by Mr. Kourtishe from the roulette table and the fruit machine combined was worth €8,895. He further shared that both men were immediately identified by the casino’s owner thanks to CCTV footage once the thefts were discovered.

The defendants admitted their wrongdoings when being questioned by their boss about the theft and signed a note acknowledging they had been the ones who stole the cash from the casino’s machines. The two of them also returned some of the cash they had stolen and provided bank drafts to cover the overall amount of the stolen money.

The legal representative of Mr. Kourtishe, Keiran Kelly BL, called for the court to take into account his guilty pleas and the fact the defendant cooperated with the garda investigation. John Griffin BL, who defended Mr. Singh in court, asked the court to take into account that his client is a husband and father, and had been dealing with some gambling issues that dated back to 2014.

As revealed by Judge Pauline Codd, Singh was the manager of the casino venue at the time when the money was misappropriated. The money was stolen while the casino’s owner was on a month’s leave. She took into account the evidence on the case and various testimonials before sentencing each of the two men to two and a half years in prison, with the imprisonment sentences being suspended in full on strict conditions.



 Author: Harrison Young

Harrison Young is an experienced writer, who started his career almost 8 years ago. Prior to joining our team at CasinoGamesPro, he worked as an editor for a small magazine.
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