SINGAPORE: The former chief financial officer of Trek 2000, the tech firm that invented the thumbdrive, was sentenced on Monday to 11 months in jail and a fine of S $20,000 after pleading guilty to a number of charges.
Gurcharan Singh was convicted of eight charges including one charge of conspiring with others to falsify Trek 2000's financial statements, one charge of instigating an employee to forge documents and two charges of abetting another to falsify documents.
In a news release, the Singapore Police Force SPF said nine other similar charges were taken into account for the purposes of sentencing.
The charge regarding interested person transactions involved a company called T-Data Systems whose sole shareholder was the wife of Trek 2000's ex-executive director Poo Teng Pin.
In 2011 the group Trek 2000 was involved with seven transactions with T-Data Systems, totalling US $2.79 million.
T-Data was an interested person in relation to Trek 2000, because of the mainboard-listed company, and under the SGX-ST mainboard rules. All seven transactions had to be announced immediately.
SPF said that Trek 2000 recklessly failed to make the necessary disclosures, and this failure was attributable to Singh's neglect, amongst other things.
Singh knew that T-Data was an interested person but did not take any steps to get Trek 2000 to make the necessary disclosures. Singh also conspired with Poo and former Trek 2000 CEO Henn Tan to falsify the company's financial statements between November and December 2015 by recording a fictitious sale to Unimicron Technology Corp worth US $3.2 million.
In February 2016, the auditors of Trek 2000, Ernst Young LLP, queried the fictitious sale to Unimicron and requested supporting documents, said SPF.
Singh then conspired with Tan, Poo and another employee who is also facing charges to deceive Ernst Young into believing that the sale to Unimicron was genuine. Singh instigated an employee to forge two bank advices to support the fictitious Unimicron sale, and together with his co-conspirators, created a false chronology of events relating to the fictitious Unimicron sale. Ernst Young sent a report to the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority, ACRA SPF.
The police said that the court proceedings against the other employee referred to in this case are ongoing.