36 weeks’ jail for condo manager who embezzled over S$20K from residents’ payments

SINGAPORE: The property manager of a condominium who had residents transfer their payments to his account and then used more than S$20,000 for personal purposes was given a 36-week jail sentence.

Loh Nguang Chye, 55, pleaded guilty to charges of criminal breach of trust and possession of benefits from criminal conduct.

According to a Mothership report, Loh misappropriated money on 69 occasions, and by the time his scheme was found out, he had spent the funds in repaying his debt.

The report added that Loh was slapped with two other charges because he had hired a woman to work as a masseuse in a business he owned. Not only did he hire her without approval, but he also did not ensure that she would not provide guests with lewd services.

In 2022, as he worked as a property manager, he was in charge of payments to the Management Corporation Stata Title (MCST) office. What Loh did was have the condo residents give him their payments in cash or have them deposit them into his PayNow account, and not into the official accounts of the MCST. A total of S$20,663.73 was taken by Loh in this manner.

By the end of that year, however, a senior manager found discrepancies in the accounting records of the estates that Loh managed. When she confronted Loh about them, he admitted that he used the money for his own purposes.

And while she gave him 10 days to return the funds, Loh could not do so. After he was fired from the company, the manager filed a police report against Loh on Dec 29, 2022.

Moreover, after he was fired, his creditors began to repeatedly harass the company, as well as one of his colleagues.

This year, Loh was able to partially pay the company back, handing in three payments of S$1,500 in September, November, and earlier this month.

Mothership also reported that Loh allowed an acquaintance named “Alvin” to use his OCBC bank account to receive his alleged winnings from gambling, withdraw the funds, and then pass them on to an unknown woman, who would in turn give them to Alvin.

On Dec 29 and 30, 2022, his account received S$7,650 through 19 transactions, which he withdrew after every transaction.

The report added that the money deposited into Loh’s account had actually been sent by victims of unlicensed moneylenders, who deposited the funds after being threatened by the loansharks.

The authorities learned about this after a complaint from a 26-year-old childcare teacher who had sent S$1,000 to Loh’s account after the loansharks deceived her into believing that she had borrowed money from them and needed to pay them back. /TISG

Read also: Former Citiraya CEO Ng Teck Lee remanded for third week without lawyer access in embezzlement case