THE former chief executive officer of Linair Technologies was sentenced to a total of four months' jail on Wednesday for corruption.

Oh Boon Hua, 40, is given until Dec 26 to start his sentence.

Oh, who is now doing hotel management in China, had earlier pleaded guilty to three charges of giving $35,000, US$30,000 and US$20,000 to Mr Lim Niann Tsyr in 2003 and 2004 for recommending Linair and another company to be awarded part of a project to build Biopolis .

Both Mr Lim 41, then operations manager of Honeywell, and a middleman, Anthony Lim Tiong Teck, have been dealt with for corruption. Mr Anthony Lim, 35, was regional sales manager of Phoenix Controls Corporation in charge of the project.

Linair is a listed company providing environmental-control exhaust systems and critical airflow control systems to semiconductor, wastewater treatment, pharmaceutical and biotechnological industries.

A district court heard that in June 2003, Mr Lim Niann Tsyr met Anthony at Honeywell where Anthony proposed if Mr Lim that if he could convince Honeywell management to allow Phoenix to subcontract their job to a local representative, he would be duly rewarded.

Anthony estimated the job to be about US$935,000.

Anthony told Mr Lim that the local representative would be called Linair Technologies. Mr Lim agreed and wanted US$100,000 in return for his help.

Anthony then told Oh that he needed to pay 'commission'' of about US$100,000 to clinch the Biopolis project. Oh agreed and set up a company called Integrated Solutions Engineering (ISE) under the name of his wife's godsister. The funding for ISE came from Linair through Oh.

Mr Lim then convinced Honeywell's management that the Biopolis project needed extra manpower and proposed Linair with its strong financial and technical background.

As a result Linair/ISE was eventually appointed two contracts worth US$935,000 for the Biomedical research project at North Buona Vista Drive.

Pleading for leniency, Senior Counsel Hri Kumar told District Judge Jasvender Kaur that his client, married with an adopted daughter, started his own company, Linair, at the age of 30. By 2004, its value was $11 million and it went public within seven years.

He said Oh neither compromised the integrity of the Biopolis project nor concealed the commission payments at any time.

Apart from doing charitable work in China, Oh had in 1998 cared for two strangers who were involved in a serious car accident in Johor, Malaysia.

Oh, who had six other similar charges considered, could have been jailed for up to five years and/or fined up to $100,000 on each of the three bribery charges.