CRIMINAL CASE NO. 233 OF 2010
COURT: I have to sentence you for three charges of theft and one charge of attempted theft.
You pleaded guilty to the charges in the Magistrate’s Court.
The charges arise out of your employment back in 2002. You were then employed as a support clerk at Coutts Bank in Hong Kong. One of your duties involved the input of a password in order for funds to be transferred to the company involved in clearing credits between banks in Hong Kong.
You put in your password, two other employees put in their passwords in order to allow for a transfer. Those passwords of the other two should have been kept secret from you. They were not.
I accept the thrust of the mitigation and the explanations you put forward. And I will act on the basis that it is correct that you told someone in Macau what it was that you did for a living and that they suggested that you use your position to steal.
There is no need for me to repeat back to you at length what happened because it has just been read out in the Summary of Facts. Basically you diverted by using the passwords HK$130 million to the bank account of a casino in Macau, where your confederate there sought to withdraw the money in chips and get away with it.
Because of an almost astonishing greed, you had got 130 million out, you went for more, you overdrew the account and it came to the attention of those above you in the bank and the transaction was stopped. And in subsequent civil proceedings they have recovered the funds that you stole.
You will have been told that there are guidelines for what we call breach of trust cases like yours and, in looking at a starting point for a sentence after trial, one looks at the amount stolen. In your case you come at a band that starts where a man steals $15 million only, you have stolen 130, of course. The man that steals 15 has to expect a starting point in excess of 10 years. But your counsel very nicely reminds me that these are starting point and guidelines only and that it is not just the amount involved that has to be considered.
He makes these points on your behalf. That the degree of trust imposed upon you by your employer was not great, and indeed, your salary at the time was something in the region of $9,000 a month indicates just that.
He makes the point that this was not dishonesty carried out over a long time. The actual mechanics of the theft took place on one day. The point is made that the bank recovered all its money and this is not a case where the mischief exists of personal loss to anybody. And there is no pain of loss to any particular victim or repercussion on any colleague at the bank.
I will accept that it was not your idea. You were not the mastermind. And I accept the picture painted of what has happened after the event, namely that your confederate supported you meagrely for a while $1,000 Renminbi per month for a few years, thereafter you were in grave difficulties not daring to work in the Mainland.
And your counsel makes, in effect, the point that over this last eight years or so, having had nothing out of the crime, what you have in fact reaped is a miserable time living hand to mouth without your family, isolated on the Mainland. And it was such a condition that prompted you, obviously, to surrender yourself in February of this year which you did to the authorities in China, coming to Hong Kong in March.
You had left school in Form 5 and you had been supporting your family, your father having died when you were young. Most people in these courts who have to face up to stealing as much as $130 million are men of education and qualification who can be described as experienced fraudsters. You are not that.
I have spent quite some time setting out factors in your favour but it is worthwhile repeating that your plan to steal in the hundreds of millions of dollars was an extremely serious crime and it is one which will obviously attract a long term of imprisonment.
However, having listened to your counsel this morning and borne in mind what he has said to me and also bearing in mind that the maximum term for a single charge of theft is 10 years, I am minded to pass a sentence less than I had in mind when I first came into court.
Bearing in mind your surrender and those other matters to which I have already referred, I will take a starting point for sentence on the overall sum that you stole of 9 years. You earn yourself a one-third discount by your plea and the sentence I shall pass on Counts 1 to 3 inclusive is a sentence of 6 years. They will all run concurrently to each other.
On the 4th count which is an attempt, I shall reduce the sentence to one of 5 years making it concurrent because it was all part and parcel of the same matter. So the total sentence you face today is one of 6 years' imprisonment.
I do not think, realistically, you could have hoped for less and you owe the fact that it is that short to the efforts made by your counsel on your behalf because he has managed to make me see, in effect, it is not just all about the numbers and the significant mitigation he put before me has enabled me to take a course that many would regard as lenient.