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Ex-VP jailed 14 years for part in cheating her company of $10 million

File photo of Singapore’s currency. (PHOTO: Getty Images)
File photo of Singapore’s currency. (PHOTO: Getty Images)

She was a high-flying executive who abused her position to cheat her company of $10 million over six years with four other persons.

Of the amount, Linda Lee, a 39-year-old Singaporean, took almost $5 million and splurged on private homes in Singapore and Batam, home renovations, valuables like watches and handbags, two insurance policies and a car.

Lee was sentenced to 14 years’ jail in the State Courts on Friday (8 September) after she pleaded guilty to 35 cheating charges last week. A total of 326 other similar charges were taken into consideration during sentencing.

According to court documents, Lee joined UE ServiceCorp Singapore, a subsidiary of public-listed United Engineers Limited (UEL) as an assistant manager in 2009. Over the next five years, she was promoted several times and eventually became Vice President (Asset Management) in 2014.

Some time in 2009, Lee was approached by a co-accused, Tan Aik Gee, a manager at Ying Xin Services, a general contractor that had previously provided its services to UEL. Lee and Tan came up with a scheme to cheat UEL.

Tan would provide Lee with letterheads of various contractors. Using the letterheads, Lee would prepare false quotations to submit for fake job requests in a system.

The job requests would be done for properties that had sufficient or extra allocated funds. Due to her position, she was the requester, the first approving officer and the person responsible for ensuring that a job was completed. As Lee rose in position, she was given more responsibilities at the company and as such, the scale of the cheating got bigger.

Tan then roped in Wong Weng Kong in 2011, with Wong providing the letterhead for TW Construction Engineering. Wong also set up five other companies with his wife and daughter’s names in 2013 and 2014 so that Lee can award jobs to those companies too.

Lee also used her father’s name to set up LT Engineering Consultancy to siphon money from UEL in 2011. This, however, was done without the knowledge of her father and the other co-accused persons.

Two other accused persons, Ng Shun Jun and Tan Kiam Boon, were brought into the conspiracy to help Lee in creating false quotations in 2013 and 2015, respectively. Lee bought a dot-matrix printer for the purpose of creating fake invoices, and also made fake company stamps based on the letterheads in her possession.

The orders for the fake jobs ranged from $292,000 to $498,000. Wong would take 10 per cent of each job that involved his companies, while the rest would be equally split between Lee and Tan Aik Gee.

Lee also made UEL pay a total of $220,000 for her home renovation by creating fake jobs to be done at UE Square, which is owned by UEL. To ensure that renovation company Pure Concept could be given the jobs, she created a false quotation and two supporting fake quotations. After UEL issued a cheque for each job, Lee would collect the payment and hand it to Pure Concept.

To date, only $910,224.36 of the $10.1 million amount siphoned from UEL has been recovered, mostly from the sale of Lee’s luxury goods at a loss. The company is trying to recover a further $1.2 million from her.

According to a mitigation document previously submitted by Lee’s lawyers, Lee came from a humble family and had cooperated with the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB). In addition, Lee went to UEL’s internal auditors to admit to her misdeeds before she was called up by CPIB.

Lee also suffers from a mental disorder, which had caused her to indulge in compulsive purchases of luxury goods. Lee’s lawyers also claimed that UEL could have had a “higher standard of check and balance”.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Jasmin Kaur had pushed for a jail term of 14 years, given the astronomical sum involved in the cheating scheme.