Director’s jail sentence for corruption shortened
TODAY file photo
SINGAPORE — A company director convicted of 15 charges of corruption successfully appealed against her sentence on Wednesday (April 5), with the High Court judge lowering her jail term from eight to three weeks.
Her lawyers argued against putting her behind bars and pushed for a severe fine instead, but Justice See Kee Oon ruled that the custodial threshold had been crossed and did not think a fine would suffice.
Winnie Lee, 44, was first sentenced last September for her offences of trying to manipulate tender processes in her submissions to the Singapore Aviation Academy (SAA), the training wing of the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore.
Lee, who was also creative director of Achates 360, had provided design services for the journals, periodicals and publicity items of the SAA.
In the academy’s tender process, three quotations had to be submitted, and Lee would submit two false quotations from fake companies for each tender, apart from an authentic one by Achates 360.
The fake companies quoted higher prices, so that this would give her own firm an unfair advantage to win the contract on a lower price.
The offences occurred over a period of almost five years involving more than 30 contracts worth about S$66,500.
In court on Wednesday, Lee’s lawyers, led by Ms Melanie Ho, argued that her sentence should be reduced to a severe fine, as opposed to a custodial sentence, on grounds of a “lack of severity in manipulation for personal gain”.
“This is not a standard crime ... and not a person who runs her life cheating people,” Ms Ho said. She added that Lee was not “here to take away the severity of the offence”, and had accepted that her mistake was “absolutely wrong”, but the appeal was “whether the severity of the offences warrants the (sentence)”.
The prosecution, led by Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Sanjiv Vaswani, argued that Lee’s jail term was “by no means excessive”, and that she had “wanton disregard for a well-known public procurement practice”.
District Judge Salina Ishak, who delivered the eight-week jail term, said at the time of sentencing then that Lee had “clearly played an active role as she had deliberately manipulated the quotations in order to protect her own rice bowl”. She also said that Lee had gained personally from the submission of false quotations.
In mentioning this, Ms Ho said that there was “no evidence that this was a rice bowl, or personal gain, issue”, and that it was incorrect to “conflate (the fact that) Lee had a 40 per cent share in the company with that of personal gain”.
Ms Ho also pointed out that the net profit from these contracts was small, and in averaging the amount, it would be around S$800 to S$900 a year over the period of time. “This is not an accused person doing this to save her rice bowl,” she said.
DPP Sanjiv rebutted that Lee had “a lot to gain from this”. By submitting the false quotations, Lee had “in the same stroke, eliminated the competition”, he said.
At the end of the hearing, Justice See concluded that Lee’s level of culpability was “on the lower end”, even though he agreed that the custodial threshold had been crossed.
Lee was then sentenced to one week per charge, with the first three charges to run consecutively.
