SINGAPORE: A man who cheated his employer by masking his hand in maintenance works supposedly outsourced to a contractor was sentenced to nine months’ jail on Tuesday (Feb 18).
Then an engineering supervisor with SIA Engineering Company, 68-year-old Leong Siew Pui cheated the company into believing it was paying another company, Aittix Engineering, for repair services.
In fact, Leong was the one who carried out the works, which related to an engine test facility. He used Aittix’s name to bid for contracts in open tenders, but did not hold any position in Aittix.
The Singaporean earlier pleaded guilty to three charges of cheating SIA Engineering Company, which provides maintenance services for the aircraft fleet of Singapore Airlines.
He is no longer with the company, with his lawyer Gino Hardial Singh last telling the court that he works as a Grab driver and does odd manual jobs.
Leong had been working for SIA Engineering since 1978 and was approaching retirement in 2009.
That year, he came up with the idea to provide maintenance and repair services for SIA Engineering Company as an external contractor after he retired.
He observed during the course of his work that external contractors often needed two to three days for maintenance inspections, but he could not allow them this time due to operational constraints.
He felt he was better placed to perform the maintenance and repair works than external contractors because he knew exactly when he could schedule the works.
Around Chinese New Year that year, he spoke to Mr Alex Tan Han Wen, the owner of Aittix, which provided printing trading services at the time.
Leong asked Mr Tan if he was interested in providing maintenance works, but the latter initially declined as he had no experience with them.
He agreed to Leong using Aittix to bid for contracts in an open tender of SIA Engineering Company, as he felt that Aittix would benefit from having reputable clients like SIA Engineering Company.
That year, Aittix won an open tender to be a vendor of SIA Engineering Company. The company went on to award Aittix a series of contracts from 2014 to 2017. Investigations could not establish if Leong used confidential information to make the successful bids.
Over this period, Aittix issued SIA Engineering Company a total of 43 invoices.
Leong provided all the invoiced services instead of Aittix, except for two invoices to repair sound absorbing panels. He claimed to have intended to perform these works at a later stage.
Leong performed the maintenance and repair services contracted to Aittix on his off days or after office hours on a working day, even employing an assistant to help.
He did not reveal to SIA Engineering Company his link to Aittix, or that he was providing the services on behalf of Attix.
In total, SIA Engineering Company paid Aittix S$382,517 (US$285,000) across all six of Leong’s charges.
The offences were discovered when the police received information about a suspected case of fraud in January 2019.
Leong estimated that he earned a profit of S$63,737 from the arrangement, which he has surrendered to the police.
He has also fully restituted the sum of S$38,984 for the two invoices for work that was not done.
Leong’s lawyer Mr Singh, who sought five months’ jail for his client during sentencing arguments, said there were no complaints about Leong’s work on SIA Engineering Company’s engine test cell, which is used to test the performance of aircraft engines.
In respect of works Leong performed in 2017 – which formed one of the proceeded charges – the prosecution also said there was no evidence the works were defective.
SIA Engineering Company previously said that Leong’s focus was on the upkeep of “limited areas of an engine test facility”. He did not perform any maintenance or repair tasks related to aircraft or aircraft engines, the company said.
“The contracts awarded to Aittix Engineering were limited to maintaining only specific non-critical areas of the engine test facility,” it added.
“These contracts did not involve aircraft or aircraft engine maintenance, nor did they affect SIA Engineering Company’s maintenance work or aircraft safety.”
SIA Engineering Company has since ended its contract with Aittix.
For cheating, an offender can be jailed for up to three years, or fined, or both.
