The Kaohsiung District Court has sentenced a National Sun Yat-sen University employee to four years in prison for embezzlement and counterfeiting.
The employee, a man surnamed Yang (楊), sold Carrefour gift vouchers that were entrusted to him and tried to pass off their photocopies as the originals, the court said.
The ruling can be appealed.
Photo: Huang Liang-chieh, Taipei Times
Yang started working at the university’s personnel office in 2020 and had access to a safe where hundreds of Carrefour gift vouchers worth NT$1,000 each were kept, the court said.
The university had purchased the vouchers in 2017 through an open tender to distribute them to employees on their birthdays, it said.
The court said Yang had gambling debts and tried to pay them back by selling the vouchers, after realizing that the university had not recorded the vouchers’ serial numbers and did not keep tabs on the total amount in the safe.
Yang in June 2020 stole 230 vouchers and sold them to a man surnamed Huang (黃) at NT$900 each after contacting him online, the court said.
He sold another 234 vouchers to Huang in September at the same price, it said.
Yang one month later stole 84 more vouchers from the safe and kept them for personal use, the court said.
The university in November procured 994 Carrefour gift vouchers, of which Yang stole 900 and again sold to Huang in two batches, the ruling said.
However, at the end of that month, university officials conducted a check and found that most of the vouchers were missing.
Asked about the matter, Yang told the officials that he had taken the vouchers home for safekeeping.
He later returned the vouchers that he had kept for himself and made 900 color photocopies to replace some of the vouchers he had stolen.
However, when taking inventory of contents of the safe two days later, university staff realized that the photocopy vouchers had a rough texture, the court said.
They contacted Carrefour to verify the amount of vouchers purchased by the university and their serial numbers, and discovered that Yang had used some of the stolen vouchers to shop at the hypermarket.
Yang’s parents tried to dissuade the staff from contacting the police by offering to buy 270 vouchers worth NT$1,000 each, but to no avail.
Yang denied any wrongdoing during initial questioning, telling police that he took the vouchers home for safekeeping, because the safe was not secured, the court said.
He also denied selling the vouchers and making counterfeit copies.
However, he admitted to his alleged misconducts during trial.
The court based its ruling on the Criminal Code, which stipulates a punishment of three to 10 years in prison for altering “government bonds, stock certificates or securities.”
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