THE QUEEN v. CHAN KIT LING

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL

1987, No .395
(Criminal)

THE QUEEN

and

CHAN KIT-LING

_____________

____________________

J U D G M E N T

____________________

Yang, V.-P.:

1. The Applicant pleaded guilty before Judge Corcoran to thirty charges of false accounting brought under Section 19(1)(a) of the Theft Ordinance, Cap. 210 and was sentenced to three years' imprisonment on each charge, sentences to run concurrently.

2. The Applicant was employed as an account's clerk in Cummings Engineering Co. Ltd. from June 1985 to June 1986. It would appear from the facts that, account's clerk though she was, she was in fact a junior officer working on her own without supervision, and she had to handle very large sums of money, thereby having to face temptation in the course of her work.

3. In the period of that one year in which she was employed, on various occasions she made false entries into her company's ledger. These entries were false in that the sums of money so entered were stated to have been spent on petty cash, expenses of her employer, when in fact they had not been so spent. These false entries were made in order to cover up the defalcation by the Applicant of cash which she had received on behalf of her employer. The total sum of money involved came just under HK$178,000. She spent some of that money on her boy friend, some on paying off her brother's debts but most of the money she spent on herself including a month's holiday in Europe where she bought herself some clothes.

4. The judge called for a probation officer's report but there is very little that is favourable in that report. The learned judge rightly regarded her offence as a systematic fraud. Our attention was drawn to the Attorney General v. Lam Tai Kuen Application for Review No. 16 of 1986, where a manager committed a similar type of offence defrauding his company of some $480,000. The sentence was two years' imprisonment in that case.

5. In this case we have regard to the long period of time during which the fraud was perpetrated and that the money was used not, as it were, to pay for the medical expenses of a sick mother or pay off the debts of a hard- pressed father, but was used largely to having a good time on her own.

6. However in all the circumstances we think, that the sentence of three years is high and taking into consideration all the circumstances which I have just set out we think an appropriate sentence is one of two years.

7. We therefore allow the application, treat the application as hearing of the appeal, set aside the sentence of three years and substitute therefore a sentence of two years.