SINGAPORE (The Straits Times/Asia News Network): An assistant finance manager who was heavily in debt began misappropriating money belonging to his firm.
Over more than three years, Ho Kam Weng got away with stealing more than S$5 million until the company’s chief finance officer became suspicious in October 2018.
On Friday (March 10), the 54-year-old pleaded guilty to three charges of criminal breach of trust by an employee. One similar charge and another for forgery will be taken into consideration during his sentencing.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Magdalene Huang said Ho was the assistant finance manager at EZY InfoTech, a distributor for IT equipment, since 2009.
As the firm was restricted to certain locations under its distribution agreements, it set up another company – Silver Crown (HK) – in Hong Kong, in order to conduct sales in other countries.
DPP Huang said that although Silver Crown and EZY InfoTech were designed to look like completely unrelated entities on paper, the former’s operations and finances were controlled by EZY’s management.
The assets of Silver Crown, including money in its corporate bank account, belonged to EZY and were at its disposal.
To facilitate this arrangement, Ho was assigned to be in charge of Silver Crown’s financial matters respectively, while another employee of EZY was in charge of its operational matters.
Tasked to take charge of Silver Crown’s China Construction Bank (Asia) account, Ho was entrusted with its password and banking token.
Some time in 2015, Ho incurred hefty debts to unlicensed moneylenders and began transferring money from Silver Crown’s bank account to his personal bank account.
He then withdrew some of the money and transferred the rest to designated bank accounts provided by the unlicensed moneylenders.
Some time between April and May 2018, in order to conceal the fact that he had misappropriated US$700,000 (about S$948,600) from a sum of US$1,707,982.34 disbursed to Silver Crown, Ho used a software to alter a statement of accounts dated May 5, 2018, that was issued by China Construction Bank (Asia).
His offences came to light when the chief finance officer sensed that something was amiss and made enquiries.
The management of EZY then confronted Ho, who confessed to his offences, and the chief finance officer called the police on Oct 20, 2018.
It was later revealed that Ho had dishonestly misappropriated a total sum of US$3,807,087.14 from Silver Crown’s account by transferring the money to his account between April 21, 2015 and Aug 15, 2018.
Ho is in remand and will return to court on April 20 to be sentenced.
For each count of criminal breach of trust, he can be jailed for up to seven years and fined.
