Ad agency finance manager who siphoned close to S$3.2 million jailed

SINGAPORE — He was entrusted with pre-signed cheques to settle payments whenever his boss went overseas, but the finance manager siphoned close to S$3.2 million from his company over eight years.

Gene Chong Soon Hui, who worked for O2 Advertising for 15 years, was sentenced to 11 years’ jail on Friday (April 6).

The 44-year-old faced 194 charges and has made no restitution.

Court documents revealed that Mr Chong’s direct supervisor, finance director Lim Kok Yong, 56, would hand Chong cheques pre-signed by chief executive Adrian Tan when asked, without doing any checks.

Chong’s duties included paying suppliers and handling petty cash, and the cheques were pre-signed so that payments would not be delayed when Mr Tan was overseas.

But Chong cooked up fictitious transactions and wrote his own name and bank account details on the pre-signed cheques more than 160 times.

To conceal his crimes, he recorded the transactions as payments to various suppliers in the company’s ledgers.

As the company’s expenses increased considerably as a result of his misappropriation, Chong falsified accounts by raising fake invoices to create the impression that money was owed to the company. He would then then issue credit notes to write off these unpaid debts.

Chong resigned in 2015 for reasons not specified in court documents. The managing director of the firm lodged a police report against him for misappropriating company funds on March 24, 2016.

Seeking a jail sentence of at least 12 years, Deputy Public Prosecutor V Jesudevan said Chong abused a “great degree of trust” and brazenly fleeced the company for a long time.

There was “significant premeditation” and at no point did it occur to him to cease offending, he added.

For each cheating charge, Chong could have been jailed for up to 10 years and fined.