SINGAPORE – Trek 2000 International’s former chief financial officer Gurcharan Singh has been sentenced to 11 months’ jail and fined $20,000 for falsifying accounts, forgery and not disclosing interested party transactions.
Singh was convicted of eight charges on Monday, with nine other similar charges taken into account in sentencing him.
This comes after Trek 2000’s founder Henn Tan and former executive director Poo Teng Pin were convicted of charges in related conspiracies.
Tan was sentenced to 16 months’ jail in October, while Poo received nine months.
Investigations by the Commercial Affairs Department revealed that in 2011, mainboard-listed Trek 2000 – known for inventing the thumb drive – had entered into seven transactions valued at approximately US$2.79 million (S$3.79 million) with T-Data Systems. The sole shareholder of T-Data is the wife of Trek 2000’s Poo, which makes T-Data an interested party in relation to Trek 2000.
However, Trek 2000 “recklessly failed to make the necessary disclosures”, and this failure was attributable to Singh’s neglect, among other things, the Singapore police said in a statement on Monday.
“Singh knew that T-Data was an interested person but did not take any steps to get Trek 2000 to make the necessary disclosures,” the police said.
Singh also conspired with Tan and Poo to manipulate the company’s books for the financial year ended Dec 31, 2015, by recording a fictitious sale worth US$3.2 million to Unimicron Technology.
Singh, Tan, Poo and another employee then deceived the company’s auditors from Ernst & Young into believing the sale was genuine, the police said. The employee is said to be then president of regional sales Foo Kok Wah, who is also facing charges.
Singh instigated an employee to forge two bank advices to support the fictitious Unimicron sale. He and his co-conspirators created a document setting out a false chronology of events relating to the bogus sale.
Earlier in 2011, Tan instructed Singh to record fictitious licensing income in the group’s accounts, purportedly payable by Toshiba Electronics Asia, to boost the group’s reputation in the industry, the police said.
Some time between 2012 and 2013, Singh also conspired with Poo to falsify documents to record the fictitious income.
Between February and October 2015, Singh instructed Poo to instruct another employee to fake seven invoices to record a total of US$1.74 million in fictitious licensing income supposedly earned from Toshiba.
From June 2015, the group continued to record fictitious licensing income earned from Toshiba and forged invoices to reduce prices for Toshiba’s memory chips, in order to inflate its gross profits.
To offset the false increase in gross profits, Singh instructed the forgery of 15 Toshiba invoices and two credit notes to record fictitious operating expenses.
