SINGAPORE — A former Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) officer who was convicted of forging medical certificates (MCs) lost his appeal against his sentence of four months’ jail yesterday.

Mohammad Saqib Mohd Ghalib, who was a staff sergeant, pleaded guilty to fraudulently forging 15 MCs over a four-month period and was sentenced in August last year.

His lawyer S K Kumar argued that the District Judge did not take into account that Saqib had been diagnosed with “various ailments” and suffered breathing problems because he was overweight and that he had been genuinely unwell when he went to see the doctors.

Mr Kumar also said that the offence had “no connection” to him being a uniformed officer and pleaded with the court to consider Saqib’s “unblemished” record of service in the ICA. Saqib’s sentence should have been a fine, he said.

In dismissing the appeal, High Court Judge Choo Han Teck said that, given the number of times that Saqib had forged the MCs and the fact that he was a public servant, a custodial sentence “can’t be thought as manifestly excessive”.

Between December 2010 and March 2011, the 35-year-old would tell doctors that the ICA required them to sign and stamp in three places on the MCs.

He would then alter the MCs by cancelling the original date of issue and writing a new date beside the second or third signature, making it appear as if the doctor had made the amendments.

Saqib, who had performed 11 years of service, was exposed when his supervisor went through his MCs and discovered that he had exceeded his annual medical leave entitlement by 42 days.

Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Kevin Yong pointed out that Saqib had missed a total of 29 days of work and had given the excuse that he was “too tired” or “lazy”, suggesting that he wanted to avoid work.

He also only saw the doctor a day or so after he called in sick. Even if one did not like his job, that was not an excuse for a public servant at the forefront of Singapore’s border security, DPP Yong added.