Former car rental company clerk jailed for forging cheques, pocketing more than S$1m over five years

SINGAPORE — Erasable ink: That was all it took for a 58-year-old woman to swindle her employer of more than S$1 million over nearly five years.

Mariam Ahmad had it all planned out — she would prepare fictitious payment vouchers and write the payees’ names on cheques with erasable ink.

Once her boss approved the payments, she would erase the payees’ names, and rewrite her name on the cheques with permanent ink.

On Friday (Dec 21), Mariam, a former accounts and administration clerk at LH Car Rental, was sentenced to eight years and 10 months’ jail.

She pleaded guilty to 30 counts of her offences, which include 20 counts of forging cheques, and another 10 of transferring the ill-gotten monies to various bank accounts to conceal her criminal activity.

Another 277 counts of similar offences were taken into consideration during sentencing.

The court heard on Friday that Mariam was the only person in her company who dealt with its cheques.

In the course of working with LH Car Rental, she noticed that “there was a lack of checks and balances in the issuance and signing of the company’s cheques”, Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Nicholas Lim said.

And so she hatched her plan to siphon money from the company, and carried it out from January 2011 to July 2015.

In total, Mariam forged 242 cheques and made off with more than S$1,090,000.

The biggest cheque she forged was for S$7,699.62.

She deposited the cheques into her Maybank account, and on 28 occasions she also transferred some of the deposited funds into her daughter’s POSB account, in hopes of erasing her trail.

In August 2012, she opened another bank account and proceeded to transfer some of the money there.

With the money she embezzled from the company, she splurged on a range of items and services.

These included giving cash to friends and family in Singapore and Indonesia, purchasing gold jewellery for herself, her daughters and granddaughter, and paying for overseas trips.

“(She) has dissipated all the monies which she had dishonestly obtained from the company,” DPP Lim added.

When she was caught for her acts, her daughter’s bank account had no money left. Her other bank accounts had less than S$30 remaining.

Her ruse unravelled when United Overseas Bank called LH Car Rental director Law Kok Leng in August 2015 to inform him that a cheque from the company, made payable to Mariam, had not been filled in properly.

It was then that he did a check on the company’s accounts, and realised the extent of his employee’s criminal activity.

ALL FOR PERSONAL BENEFIT: PROSECUTION

Urging the court to impose a total sentence of at least eight years and six months, DPP Lim said Mariam had caused “massive” harm to the company, all for her own personal benefit.

The amount embezzled from the company was “staggering”, he noted, adding that no restitution has been made to the company.

DPP Lim added that this was Mariam’s third such offence. She has previously been jailed for criminal breach of trust in 2002 and 2005.

“This is (her) third strike, and it is clear that she has not learnt her lesson from the past two terms of incarceration,” he said.

Lastly, her offences — which DPP Lim said took place over “an extended period of time” — were an abuse of the trust that Mr Law had placed in her.

Mariam, who had no lawyer, pleaded for leniency from the court.

“I apologise… I feel demoralised and remorseful. I know what I have done cannot be undone. I apologise again,” she said, holding back tears.

“I am penniless, I have no money now,” she added.

In sentencing Mariam, District Judge Terence Tay agreed with the prosecution that the amount siphoned was “staggering”.

He noted that the money was “spent on non-necessities”, and that all the money “dissipated in one way or another”.

He also stressed the importance for companies to have checks and balances, to prevent similar incidents from happening again.

As the judge delivered his sentence, Mariam kept her head down. In between tears, she later hugged family members who were also present in court.