Two wrongs do not make a right.
Instead, they may well land you an extended period in prison, as the following article serves to attest to.
Man ‘Handed’ Another 15-Month Jail Term on Top of his 14-Month Jail Term for Conspiring the Submission of Forged Documentations
According to TODAYonline, Loo Yew Teck has been sentenced to another 15 months in prison, on top of an already-incurred 14-month term.
As he has since cleared four months of his imprisonment term, he will technically only be needed to serve 19 more months. Apparently, his new sentence will run concurrently with the balance of his previous jail sentence.
According to the news report, Loo’s offences were committed during the financial year 2010 audit of the Singapore Prison Service (SPS).
A senior project manager with Thong Huat Brothers at the time, he had teamed up with several other personnel to cover up the civil engineering contractor’s overcharging for certain items. Others involved in the ‘operation’ were two SPS employees, two project managers from Boon Yong Electrical and five managers from CPG Facilities Management.
Together, the men reportedly forged 126 documents in an attempt to deceive the Auditor-General’s Office (AGO).
The offences, however, eventually came to light when someone from SPS filed a police report in 2012.
Sentencing
In court, Deputy Public Prosecutors (DPPs) Tan Hsiao Tien, Suhas Malhotra and Nicholas Khoo pushed for the imposed sentence, stating that Loo had been the “mastermind” of the scheme.
“He was motivated by self-interest and greed… Clearly, he has benefitted from the overcharging and would stand to gain from this entire fraud,” DPP Tan told the court.
“(His) actions show that the offences were not committed on the spur of the moment, but were premeditated and carefully planned over a period of time,” they added.
It should be noted that Loo had previously appealed against his conviction and 14-month imprisonment sentence. He had faced over 16 charges of “conspiring to use forged documents”.
On 8 April 2021, he pleaded guilty to another 30 charges of a similar nature, with a staggering 88 other charges taken into consideration. This gave way to another 15-month imprisonment sentence.
Apparently, he started serving his new sentence with immediate effect.
Forgery
Unfortunately, such instances are far from being non-existent of late.
On 14 August 2020, Lim Oon Kuin was charged with abetment of forgery for the purpose of cheating.
Apparently, he had instigated Freddy Tan Jie Ren, a contracts executive of Hin Leong, to forge an email which was purportedly sent to China Aviation Oil (Singapore) Corporation on 26 Feb 2019 over a sale.
Lim allegedly instructed Mr Tan to write the email’s subject header as “CAO – Sale of gasoil 10PPM sulphur”.
He is also accused of instructing Mr Tan to forge an inter-tank transfer certificate.
Both the email and document were then allegedly used to secure more than US$56 million in trade financing from a financial institution.
After Lim was charged, it was revealed that Hin Leong owed HSBC, its largest creditor, around US$600 million.
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