Man duped firm into paying inflated prices for nearly 7 years
The director of a freight-forwarding services firm was jailed for seven months after he admitted to cheating another company into paying inflated prices for almost seven years.
Eldo Thottungal Mathai, 68, pleaded guilty to three counts of cheating on Tuesday. Three other similar counts were taken into consideration during sentencing.
Court documents said the Indian national, who is also a permanent resident here, was the director of Indus Global Line (IGL) at the time of the offences.
Sometime in June 2010, Eldo got to know Hussain Naina Mohamed, a 47-year-old Indian national who worked at Utracon Structural Systems.
As an assistant shipping manager, Hussain’s responsibilities included making vendor recommendations to his superiors, and helping the firm’s sister company, Utracon Overseas, with similar tasks. Collectively, the two firms are part of Utracon Corporation.
Unbeknownst to Utracon, Hussain was also a partner at another company, Al Rahman Enterprises & Trading (Aret).
Sometime in 2011, Eldo and Hussain hatched a plan for IGL to submit inflated quotations to Utracon for freight-forwarding services.
Eldo would first send an e-mail with a legitimate quotation to Hussain’s Aret e-mail account. The latter would then respond with instructions on the mark-up amount.
Subsequently, Eldo would send the marked-up quotation to Hussain at his Utracon work e-mail address. Hussain would then review it in his capacity as the company’s assistant shipping manager.
In the three charges proceeded against Eldo, Utracon was cheated into paying IGL inflated amounts of around $374,529. The total mark-ups for these quotations were $33,231.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Jonathan Tan said that all the marked-up amounts went to Aret. After IGL received payment from Utracon, Eldo would pass Hussain the mark-ups in cash.
“While the accused did not receive the mark-ups, he profited from the business that IGL received by virtue of the deception that he and Hussain applied on Utracon,” said DPP Tan.
Had Utracon known the truth about the pair’s arrangement, and the conflict of interest on Hussain’s part as he was employed by both Utracon and Aret, it would not have made payments to IGL, said the prosecutor.
The dishonest scheme continued from October 2011 to August 2018, lasting for almost seven years.
In total, Utracon was duped into paying about $417,367 to IGL.
DPP Tan called for Eldo to be jailed for six to eight months, citing the need for deterrence and the significant difficulty in detecting the offences.
Including the offences involving Eldo, Hussain had duped Utracon into making payments totalling over $5.1 million to companies linked to him.
He was sentenced to 30 months’ jail in May after he pleaded guilty to nine counts of cheating involving more than $2.5 million and one count of moving a portion of his ill-gotten gains out of Singapore.
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