Friday, October 7, 2011

M1 employee earns $2m from false contracts

By Yahoo! Newsroom | Yahoo! Newsroom – 3 hours ago

An M1 employee created fake contracts for over 3,000 handsets and earned $2 million from selling them.

A district court heard on Friday that Matthew Yeo Kay Keng stole 3,085 handsets between April 2008 and November 2010, and sold them to third parties.

The account manager would create fake subscription contracts for mobile services supposedly made by corporate customers, The Straits Times reported.

Under these contracts, the customer would have free or subsidised handsets.

He would then intercept these handsets before they were delivered by courier, saying that he would personally deliver them.

Yeo bought Porsche cars, branded watches and bags with the money earned from under-the-table sales.

The 35-year-old also made some investments with the money.

Yeo pleaded guilty to two charges of criminal breach of trust over the 3,027 handsets and seven counts of money-laundering.

23 other charges will be taken into consideration when he is sentenced later this month.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

‘Possessed’ boys trick girls into sex

A teenage girl was tricked into performing sex acts on four teenage boys after they pretended to be possessed by gods.

The court heard that the victim, who was 14 at the time of the incident, was told that she would receive divine punishment if she refused to carry out the wishes of her alleged attackers.

She was attacked by the leader of the group, who is a school dropout and cannot be named to protect the girl's identity.

The boy came up with the trick after he saw worshippers at a Chinese temple being 'possessed' and planned to trick the girl in February 2008.

He told her that the "Chinese God of Hell" wanted to have sex with her and would kill her friends if she refused.

It was reported that he suggested to the rest of the group that they convince the girl to do their bidding as punishment after she rejected one of the boys.

The boys are alleged to have tricked her into performing the sex acts after pretending to be possessed.

In a separate incident, the group leader also raped his girlfriend, who was best friends with the other victim.

He carried out the attack in his bedroom in front of the group, after he used joss sticks to burn off a tattoo on an accomplice's finger to show he was possessed.

The group leader then raped her after telling her the Chinese gods would harm her if she refused to do as she was told.

The boy has pleaded guilty to two charges of rape and two of sexual assault, while eight other charges will be taken into consideration when he is sentenced.

While the youngest attacker, who is now 16, is on probation, the other two alleged accomplices have not been dealt with.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Groom abandons fiancée, jumps bail

By liyana | SingaporeScene – Tue, Jun 7, 2011

A man, who is held on remand and granted bail to get married, is now on the run from authorities after he failed to to turn up for his trial in a district court on Tuesday.

Irfan Ahmed Khan, 28, who was awaiting trial for drug trafficking, was granted the one-day bail of S$100,000 in the High Court last Friday. He claimed that he had to go to the Registry of Muslim Marriages on Tuesday morning with his fiancée,

The court heard that Khan, who was remanded at Changi Prison, left the facility with his elder brother at around 2pm on Monday and met his fiancée to buy some clothes for the wedding that afternoon.

However, at around 7pm, Khan entered a mosque in Yishun alone while his fiancée waited outside. But an hour later, he could not be found even after his brother searched the mosque premises.

District Judge John Ng issued a warrant of arrest for Khan and ordered his elder brother to show cause on 6 September why the bail should not be forfeited.

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Monday, June 6, 2011

Woman jailed for forging signatures on cheques

By Fann Sim | SingaporeScene – Mon, Jun 6, 2011

A 30-year-old woman has been jailed four years and 11 months for forging her former employer's signature on cheques to embezzle over S$1.3 million, reported Channel NewsAsia.

Samantha Chiam Hwee Theng, a former personal secretary, had committed the offences between February 2006 and February 2009 and pleaded guilty to nine of the 33 charges brought against her.

She had forged the signature of her ex-boss, Wu Chin Wei, 38, before using the money on shopping, vacations and household expenses.

According to her lawyer, Chiam suffered from a condition known as 'shopaholic disorder'. In mitigation, he revealed that she 'readily lost control' in the habit once she started shopping.

She is also said to have spent S$10,000 during her visits to Louis Vuitton and S$30,000 to Chanel on several occasions.

According to a report by Dr Lim Yun Chin, a psychiatrist from Raffles Hospital, Chiam's lawyer said that she had 'often experience guilt for embezzling money to fund her shopping compulsion'.

However, another psychiatrist who assessed Chiam disagreed. Dr Jerome Goh Hern Yee from the Institute of Mental Health stated that her offending was 'motivated more by social needs and her desire for her family's acceptance and respect', said Deputy Public Prosecutor Christopher Ong.

Both psychiatrists agreed that Chiam's offences involved pre-meditation and planning and were not committed on impulse and could not have been caused by her disorders.

Chiam has compensated S$100,000 to her former boss and surrendered goods amounting to S$400,000.

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Sunday, April 24, 2011

Pianist gets death sentence for murder

By Ma Lie and Lu Hongyan in Xi'an/China Daily | ANN – Sat, Apr 23, 2011 6:30 PM SGT

Xi'an (China Daily/ANN) - Yao Jiaxin, a university student who stabbed a young mother to death after knocking her down with his car in a traffic crash in October 2010, was sentenced to death on Friday by a court in Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi province.

Yao, 21, a junior at the Xi'an Conservatory of Music, ran into Zhang Miao while she was riding a bicycle. Yao was driving a Chevrolet Cruze at the time of the crash, which occurred at 10:30 pm on Oct 20. Fearing that Zhang would remember his license plate number and report him to the police, he stabbed her to death, according to the Intermediate People's Court of Xi'an.

The court also handed down a life-long revocation of Yao's political rights and ordered Yao to pay 45,498.50 yuan ($6,983) in compensation to Zhang's family.

After the stabbing, Yao drove away from the scene and, in his hurry to get away, injured two bystanders. In an interview with police on Oct 22, he denied he had committed the murder.

The next day, though, he surrendered himself to police in the company of his parents and admitted to being responsible for the killing, the court said.

Yao said he resorted to murder because he feared the "peasant woman would be hard to deal with".

On the night of her death, Zhang, 26, the mother of a 2-year-old boy, was returning home from her temporary job as a cafeteria assistant at the Chang'an campus of Northwest University.

Police said the crash left her with a small fracture in her leg and other slight injuries.

Yao, after hitting the victim, did not try to help her but instead resorted to murder to silence her. That split-second decision made his crime heinous and eliminated a possibility that he would receive a lesser punishment, the court said on Friday.

In China, criminals who turn themselves in are occasionally granted lesser punishments than those who do not.

"The motive was extremely despicable...the conduct was extremely cruel...and the consequences are extremely serious," the court judgment said.

Yao, when asked if he wants to appeal the sentence, said he needs time to make such a decision.

Relatives of Yao and Zhang, as well as hundreds of journalists and students, were present for the judgment.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Six-year-old boys sexually assault girls of same age

London, April 11 (IANS) Two six-year-old British boys have been charged with sexually assaulting five schoolgirls of the same age.
By Indo Asian News Service | IANS – Mon, Apr 11, 2011 1:39 PM SGT

Police confirmed they were 'made aware of an alleged incident but are not investigating' because the boys were under 10, the age of criminal responsibility in Britain, according to The Sun.

The boys were still at the school in Lancashire but were chaperoned throughout the day.

Worried parents have threatened to remove their children from the school.

A mother of a student at the unnamed school said: 'These boys are probably too young to realise what they have done. But you don't expect this. It's a horrible thing to happen. One girl's behaviour apparently changed markedly after what happened.'

'We now know that at least five girls were involved and three have left,' another said.

Monday, February 14, 2011

More teen girls in underage sex

By Leong Wee Keat, TODAY | Posted: 13 February 2011 2245 hrs

SINGAPORE: The number of teenaged girls engaging in underage sex rose last year, even as the authorities scored a success in reducing the number of younger girls from doing so.

The latest police figures show that there were 198 cases of sexual penetration involving a girl aged below 16 last year. This was 10 more than in 2009.

However, the number of cases last year was an improvement from the figures in 2008, which saw 249 cases.

The police said that, most of the time, these girls were having underaged sex with men known to them, usually their boyfriends or friends.

In one such case heard last month, Muhammad Shafiq Abdul Ghani, then 20, pleaded guilty to having consensual sex with a 14-year-old girl between late February and early March, last year.

The court heard the girl had initiated sex as she wanted to "have his child". Muhammad Shafiq agreed.

Now 21, he was fined $4,000 and spared jail. District Judge Eddy Tham felt the girl's "active initiation" where the offender was below 21 was a sentencing consideration. Prosecutors have appealed.

However, statutory rape cases - for girls under 14 -improved. Compared to 2009, last year saw a 40-per-cent drop in the number of cases.

Deputy Superintendent William Goh said police have been delivering talks on teenaged sex and the law to students from secondary schools and junior colleges, as well as training teachers so that they can raise awareness on the issue.

He added: "Since 2009, police have extended such talks to social service networks, with the objective of widening the reach to create a greater awareness of the legal and social consequences of teenage sex."

Mr Yusof Ismail, chief executive of Ain Society, which works with troubled youth, suggested that the authorities could extend these talks to primary school students as he was now seeing children, aged 12 to 14, becoming sexually active.

He said: "If we want to bring numbers down over the next five years, we should consider extending efforts upstream."

Clinical psychologist Carol Balhetchet suggested using role models, such as celebrities, to deliver the abstinence message.

She added: "Families could help in spreading the right values but parents sometimes don't touch on the subject because it is awkward."

DSP Goh agreed and said all stakeholders, including the community, schools, parents, and media have an important role to play in educating youth against underage sex.

"Care should be taken by families to observe changes in the behaviour or activities of the young as most of the perpetrators in such cases are known to the victims," he added. - TODAY