Employee sold company wine to pay debts

An employee of Singaporean wine merchant Hock Tong Bee illegally sold almost 15,000 bottles of company wine for S$7m (£3.3m) to pay loan sharks.

Luciana Lim Ying Ying, 43, admitted that while working as a relationship manager at Hock Tong Bee – one of the oldest and largest independent wine and spirits merchants in Singapore – she sold wine in order to pay off her debts, according to reports by the Straits Times.

Lim committed the offences over 18 months between June 2011 and January 2013 and it was only later in March when a colleague noticed that large sums of money were outstanding from high net-worth clients that she was discovered.

She revealed to the police that she sold the bottles to pay off loan sharks who were harassing her as she had agreed to act as a guarantor for a former colleague.

The court heard that Lim registered fake clients and placed orders for high-end wines and spirits by sourcing names, addresses and contact numbers using old name cards. She also browsed the internet to look for the personal details of doctors and lawyers.

Lim would then offer to sell her company’s goods to her actual clients at lower prices, telling them she got the bottles at a staff discount, or that she had a customer who wanted to release wines cheaply.

She would then tell her company’s warehouse to send the wines and spirits to the buyers’ addresses.

Lim was convicted of four charges, criminal breach of trust, cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of a property, assisting an unlicensed money lender and using the benefits from criminal conduct. The prosecution asked that she be sentenced to 13 years with another hearing taking place next month.