Trek 2000 founder sentenced to 16 months’ jail for offences including cooking the books

TREK 2000 International ’s founder Henn Tan was sentenced to 16 months’ imprisonment on Tuesday (Oct 11) for engaging in conspiracies to falsify accounts, forge documents and deceive external auditors of the firm that developed the ubiquitous thumb drive.

The 66-year-old former chief executive of mainboard-listed Trek 2000 has been in remand since June, and this period will count towards his jail term.

Asking the court to sentence the accused to at least one year and seven months’ jail, the prosecution said his crimes “made a mockery of corporate governance in Singapore”. Offences that affect the integrity of the financial markets therefore warrant a generally deterrent sentence, argued the prosecution.

In response, Tan’s lawyer Cavinder Bull sought a jail term of 10 months and the Senior Counsel pointed out that the accused had pleaded guilty and thus there was no need for the case to go to trial.

The Singaporean, who shot to prominence as the inventor of the revolutionary thumb drive that made the floppy disk obsolete, had earlier pleaded guilty to five charges of engaging in conspiracies to falsify accounts, forging documents to cover his tracks, as well as cheating the external auditors, with four other similar charges considered by the court when deliberating on his sentence.

From as far back as between 2006 and 2011, Tan had conspired with then chief financial officer Gurcharan Singh to make false entries in the firm’s financial statements over some licensing income.

Then, when he realised it would be a dismal fiscal year 2015 for Trek, he conspired with a few senior officers to inflate revenue and pre-tax operating profit by plucking a US$3.2 million sale from thin air, using false documents to support this.

When auditor Ernst & Young confronted Tan and his co-accused about the financial statements, they were deceived and told the sale was genuine and the financial statements had been drawn up properly.

Trek’s then-president of regional sales Foo Kok Wah and former executive director Poo Teng Pin, as well as Singh, have been charged for their roles in these offences. Singh and Foo’s cases are pending while Poo has been sentenced to nine months’ jail.

Separately, for his negligence in not getting Trek to make immediate announcements required on a total of 24 interested person transactions in 2010 and 2013, Tan was fined S$80,000 in 2020.

He stepped down as CEO after objections were raised by Singapore Exchange in 2018, but he remained as chairman emeritus until 2020. Trek’s present deputy chairman Wayne Tan is his son.

Trek’s share price was down 12.3 per cent or S$0.01 to S$0.071 at market close on Tuesday.