By Shaffiq Alkhatib | Posted: 14 March 2011 1542 hrs
SINGAPORE: A
Filipino service engineer was sentenced on Monday to 18 months jail for
being part of a conspiracy, cheating Standard Chartered Bank of
S$317,100.
Mark Robert Fajilan Landicho had worked with a
syndicate that illegally helped foreigners obtain unsecured credit
facilities from the bank even though they were not eligible.
The
group did so by forging its clients' pay slips, inflating the salaries
so that their annual pay would appear to meet the bank's minimum income
requirement.
According to court documents, Landicho had worked
with two former employees from telemarketing company, Touch & Tech,
to cheat the bank between July and October 2009.
One of them is, 26-year-old Charon Legaspi Dimpas, a fellow Filipino.
Dimpas,
who used to be one of the firm's direct sales agents, was sentenced to
45 months behind bars after admitting last November that she was part of
the scam.
Her then-boss, 60-year-old Singaporean Abdul Karim Baba, has not been dealt with in court.
Touch
& Tech was engaged by Standard Chartered to market the unsecured
credit facilities the bank offered to prospective clients.
Landicho's
colleagues first referred him to Dimpas in June 2009 as he wanted to
apply for such services even though his salary did not meet the minimum
requirement.
His application was approved after she doctored his pay slips.
Soon
after this, 28-year-old Landicho started to help the syndicate solicit
for customers by advertising its illicit services on pinoysg.com, a
Singapore-based Filipino portal.
Interested parties would forward him their genuine payslips via email.
He would send them over to his accomplices, earning S$75 for each successful application.
Defence Counsel Manoj Nandwani told the court that Landicho did not falsify the documents which led to the deception.
Mr
Nandwani stressed that his client's role in the whole affair was "to
forward information to the perpetrators" without taking part in the
falsification itself.
In response to these, Deputy Public
Prosecutor, Magdalene Huang told District Judge Jill Tan than the acts
of forgery would not have taken place without Landicho's soliciting.
-CNA/ac
more FTs commiting crimes....
haiz..
Greed......