SINGAPORE - A former project manager with a car rental company created fake transactions in her employer's booking system. Then she rented the vehicles to acquaintances at discounted prices, and pocketed the difference.

Rumiyati Razali, who was in charge of processing rental applications by clients under her management, did this some 50 times between Feb 2011 and Dec 2012, causing more than $70,000 in losses to C&P Rent-A-Car. Less than $5,000 was returned.

On Tuesday, the 40-year-old was sentenced to 16 months' jail after pleading guilty to 10 charges of cheating and one of criminal breach of trust, involving some $3,400 of a locker company's money. Another 43 charges, mostly for cheating, were taken into consideration during sentencing.

The court heard that Rumiyati's clients included various government agencies such as the Singapore Armed Forces and the Public Utilities Board. When making the fictitious bookings, she would key in government agencies as the customers to obtain the vehicles, and fabricate excuses in each month's statement of accounts to explain why the clients had not paid up.

She was caught after leaving C&P Rent-A-Car. Her successor took over her accounts and started contacting the agencies to settle the debts purportedly owed.

For each count of cheating her former employer to hand over its property, Rumiyati could have been jailed up to 10 years and fined.