SINGAPORE, May 9 — A former executive of a publicly listed company that invented the thumbdrive was sentenced to two months’ jail yesterday for his role in helping inflate the firm’s revenue and net profits for the 2015 financial year.
The other executives involved are Henry Tan, Gurcharan Singh and Poo Teng Pin. Their current ages are listed in court documents as 65, 66 and 45 respectively. They include a charge of failing to make immediate announcements of interested person transactions, a charge of conspiring with others to falsify Trek 2000’s financial statements and another charge of engaging in a conspiracy to cheat the company’s auditors.
They did this by recording a fictitious sale worth US$3.2 million to the Taiwan-based electronics company Unimicron Technology. However, the court heard yesterday that Ernst & Young was not satisfied with the explanations provided by the Trek 2000 management, and reported the matter to the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority .
This, they said, was a fraud not only against the auditors, but against the investing public at large. The defence lawyers had also stated that Foo was motivated to participate in the conspiracy “by his misplaced loyalties” when the company, which facilitated the upbringing of his family, had a crisis, the judge noted.