IPOH: A former manager of a private university’s student admission, marketing, and records division was fined RM35,000 by the Sessions Court here after pleading guilty to forging student recruitment agreement documents six years ago.
Judge Meor Sulaiman Ahmad Tarmizi handed down the sentence to Mohd Khalid Ka’ab, 42, on Tuesday (July 30), and ordered him to serve four months in jail if he failed to pay the fine.
According to the charge sheet, in June 2019 at Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP) in Seri Iskandar, the accused had dishonestly used a document as genuine, namely a student recruitment agreement between Institute of Technology Petronas Sdn Bhd and Profedge Sdn Bhd, dated Aug 1, 2019.
As an agency company appointed to provide promotional services for UTP programmes and to recruit students from the Federal Territory, Selangor, and other locations for admission into UTP, the accused had a reason to believe that the document was false.
The accused committed an offence under Section 471 of the Penal Code, which is punishable under Section 465 of the same Code.
During mitigation, the accused’s counsel, Mohamad Izwan Abd Rahman, requested a lenient sentence as his client had pleaded guilty and saved the court’s time.
However, Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission’s (MACC) prosecuting officer Shahrul Azuan Ghazali requested that the court impose an appropriate sentence as a deterrent to the accused.
