Leong Siew Pui’s offences involved more than S$96,000. He pleaded guilty to three counts of cheating in January. - Photo: ST
SINGAPORE: A former engineering supervisor at a company that provides maintenance services for Singapore Airlines’ aircraft fleet was sentenced to nine months’ jail on Tuesday (Feb 18) for cheating.
Leong Siew Pui’s offences involved more than S$96,000. He pleaded guilty to three counts of cheating in January.
The 68-year-old man started working for Singapore Airlines Engineering Company (SIAEC) in 1978 and he committed the offences in 2017. He is no longer employed there.
Defence lawyer Gino Hardial Singh from Abbots Chambers said that Leong is now working as a private-hire driver and performs odd jobs to make ends meet.
Two of Leong’s charges were linked to nearly $39,000 in total.
He had duped SIAEC into paying for purported repair services by a company called Aittix Engineering, which were not carried out at all.
He has made full restitution of this amount.
Another charge involved SIAEC paying more than $57,000 for maintenance and repair services that it believed were provided by Aittix.
In reality, Leong was the one who had personally carried out the work.
Besides the restitution, he also surrendered profits totalling more than $63,000 to the police.
In earlier proceedings, the court heard that in his work for SIAEC, Leong’s tasks included supervising and maintaining its equipment.
The company also engaged independent contractors to perform maintenance and repair services for aircraft parts.
Leong was approaching retirement age in 2009 when he came up with the idea of providing such services to SIAEC as an external contractor after he retired.
Around 2009, Leong asked the owner of Aittix, which was a business linked to printing services, if he was interested in providing maintenance and repair services.
The owner initially refused to be part of the arrangement as he had no experience performing maintenance works.
Leong then asked the man if Aittix could instead be used to bid for contracts in an SIAEC open tender.
The owner agreed to this arrangement as he felt that Aittix would benefit from having reputable clients such as SIAEC.
Leong did not work for Aittix or hold any positions in it.
However, he used Aittix’s name in 2009 to make a successful bid for it to be a vendor of SIAEC.
It could not be confirmed during investigations if he had made use of confidential information in SIAEC to make the successful bid, the court heard.
In January, Deputy Public Prosecutor Jason Chua said that Aittix did not provide any of the maintenance and repair services specified in more than 40 invoices it had issued to SIAEC.
He added: “The accused provided most of these services... save for two invoices... for which no repair service was provided at all.
“The accused provided the maintenance and repair services... during his (days off) or after office hours on a working day.”
Without revealing details, the DPP said that in January 2019, police received information about a suspected case of fraud at SIAEC.
Leong was charged in court in 2023. - The Straits Times/ANN
