Nure Alam, a forty-year-old Bengali taxi driver working for Al Ghazal Taxi, has found AED 88.500 in cash in his cab.
One afternoon, Mr Alam took a Somali citizen from Sofitel Hotel in Abu Dhabi and dropped him at the Millennium Hotel on Khalifa Street. The fare was AED 4.50 and the man gave him AED 5.
An hour later, Mr Alam glanced a white envelope under the passenger seat. The envelope included two smaller envelopes with AED500 notes and AED1,000 notes – a total of AED88,500.
Commenting on that moment, Mr Alam said: “I was shaking when I saw all that cash. But it’s not my money. I did not work for it.”
After that at once, he called his company to tell them he was dropping off the envelope at Al Shabia police station.
“The police asked me why I didn’t take the money and I told them, ‘I did not work for it. Why would I take it’?”
The following day, the passenger called TransAD, the taxi regulator, to ask if they had found his money. Mr Alam picked him up again from the Sofitel and took him to the police station.
“He gave me Dh3,000 as a reward,” Mr Alam said with a smile.
On the other side, Alam’s bosses rewarded him as well.
Ali Yousef, the franchise Taxi Manager said: “As a practice, we reward our honest drivers with Dh500. But our general manager and chief executive were both very pleased and decided to give him Dh1,000.”
In addition, Mr Yousef said that Mr Alam had not committed any traffic offence and the company had not received a single complaint against him.
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Mr Alam, a father of three, said he had returned as many as 60 mobile phones and ladies’ handbags.
One of his passengers, an American man, left an iPhone in the back seat. He gave Mr Alam a Dh550 reward for its return.
“He said the phone was not important but the numbers in his phone book were,” the driver said.
On Tuesday, TransAD gave Mr Alam a certificate and Dh1,000 in a ceremony at its headquarters.
“We want him to serve as a good example to all the drivers,” said Khawla Al Dhaheri, head of section at TransAD’s call center.
“We’ve been rewarding drivers for their honesty for two years now. When we have honest and hard-working drivers, we achieve a high level of customer satisfaction in the delivery of our services.”
Every month, the 18 drivers with the highest response rate to booking requests receive Dh500. The response rate should be above 50 per cent.
“Today, we also honored 75 taxi drivers with the highest response rates from May until August,” Ms Al Dhaheri said. “Dh500 may not be a lot of money, but it means a lot to the drivers.”
Mr Alam said although he was happy with the reward money and all the recognition, the best compliment came from his daughter Dhola, 9.
“She’s so proud of me,” he said. “She told my friends in Bangladesh ‘My father is a good man, an honest man’.”
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