Singapore, (Samajweekly) An Indian-origin Sikh and former CFO of Singapore-based technology company was given 11 months’ jail and fined SGD 20,000 for falsifying accounts, forgery, and not disclosing interested party transactions.
Gurcharan Singh of TREK 2000 International was convicted on Monday of eight charges, with nine other similar charges taken into account in sentencing him, The Business Times reported.
Singh’s sentencing comes after the company’s founder Henn Tan and former executive director Poo Teng Pin were convicted of charges in related conspiracies in October.
A Commercial Affairs Department probe revealed that in 2011, Trek 2000 had entered into seven transactions valued at approximately $2.79 million with T-Data Systems. The wife of Trek 2000’s Poo Teng Pin is the sole shareholder of T-Data.
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.
Further, he conspired with Tan and Poo to manipulate the company’s books for the financial year ended on December 31, 2015, by recording a fictitious sale worth $3.2 million to Unimicron Technology, The Business Times reported.
The trio then deceived the company’s auditors from Ernst & Young into believing the sale was genuine, the police said.
Singh asked 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, the paper reported.
Between 2012 and 2013, Singh also conspired with Poo to falsify documents to record the fictitious income. In 2015, Singh asked Poo to fake seven invoices to record a total of $1.74 million in fictitious licensing income supposedly earned from Toshiba.
