Woman jailed for embezzling nearly S$38,000 from her employer Darul Aman Mosque over 2 years
The court heard that Marlina Abdul Rahman misappropriated nearly S$38,000 from Darul Aman Mosque over a two-year period when she was employed there as a corporate service officer.
SINGAPORE – Marlina Abdul Rahman was an employee of Darul Aman Mosque who was entrusted to safekeep payments made to the Eunos mosque.
But rather than ensuring that the funds went into the mosque’s coffers, Marlina squirreled away close to S$38,000 over more than two years, which she used on herself and her family instead.
Her dishonesty was eventually uncovered by a fellow mosque employee.
Marlina, 36, pleaded guilty on Wednesday (Jan 8) to one charge of criminal breach of trust as a servant and was sentenced in the State Courts to nine months’ jail. Two other similar charges were taken into consideration for sentencing.
According to court documents, Marlina was employed as the mosque’s corporate service officer from Jan 31, 2017 to August 2019 — when the offences were discovered.
Part of her duties included collecting payments to the mosque, such as public donations, fees for using the mosque’s facilities and payments for religious classes.
The mosque’s corporate and estate manager, Ms Farlida Mohamed, first noticed something was amiss when she discovered a shortfall of S$4,800 in the money collected by the mosque around the time of last year’s Hari Raya Haji, which was between Aug 10 and 14.
Concerned, Ms Farlida then checked through the receipts and the mosque’s accounting system and found about 219 manual receipts issued by Marlina.
The manual receipts are meant only as back-up, such as when the mosque’s accounting system is down, court documents stated.
Further checks by Ms Farlida found that 155 out of the 219 manual receipts were not registered in the accounting system.
In addition, nine out of 64 of the manual receipts registered with the accounting system were logged in the system with a lower amount than the actual sum involved.
Ms Farlida lodged a police report against Marlina on Oct 23 last year.
In total, Marlina misappropriated S$37,877.50. She has since made S$4,800 in restitution.
Marlina, who was unrepresented, pleaded for leniency as she had just discovered that she is pregnant.
For criminal breach of trust by a servant, she could have been jailed for up to 15 years and fined.
