ABU DHABI // A Briton is appealing against his conviction for assaulting a taxi driver and not paying the fare.
At about midnight on December 10 last year, the defendant, I J, took the taxi from a hotel on Yas Island to his home in Al Zeina Residences.
The fare was Dh9, but the taxi driver, M D, charged him Dh42.
The defendant did not have any small change, so he handed the driver a Dh500 note. But the driver refused to take the money and told him to withdraw cash from an ATM machine.
The Briton went to get the money and returned after about 30 minutes. He said he still did not have the cash, but asked the driver to take him to his house where he had money for the fare.
The Briton’s lawyer claimed that the driver then lost his temper and started screaming at his passenger and began grappling with him.
Despite a medical report stating that the driver was injured, the lawyer said there was no evidence that the driver was hurt during the scuffle.
Citing the prosecution charges, the lawyer said the trip took 20 minutes, which meant that the driver had clearly overcharged for the journey, considering the distance travelled.
“These taxi drivers hunt well-off expats to trap them,” said the lawyer. “He [the taxi driver] complained three days later and asked for Dh10,000 in compensation.”
The lawyer said the defendant and his wife both worked in Abu Dhabi and they had just bought a house worth Dh2 million.
The Briton had also recently begun work on a lucrative project in Saudi Arabia and was visiting his wife when the incident occurred.
Therefore the Briton could obviously afford to pay the taxi fare, said the lawyer. “If he did not want to pay he wouldn’t have returned to the driver, and he asked him [the driver] to follow him to his house and wait for him there,” said the lawyer.
Furthermore, the Briton had spent more than Dh70,000 travelling between the UAE and Saudi Arabia for his court hearings.
The lawyer also referred to Article 395 of the penal code, which penalises every passenger who refuses to pay a taxi fare without a valid reason.
But the Briton did have a valid reason not to pay, said the lawyer, who ended his argument by ataching Dh9 to his defence memo for the case and asked that his client be acquitted.
The Briton had previously been fined Dh2,000. A verdict will be announced on April 30.
hdajani@thenational.ae
