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| Jeans (left) accompanied by a male friend, leave Eastern court after an earlier hearing |
A Filipina restaurant manager was sentenced to six
months in prison yesterday, Friday, after being found guilty of stealing a
total of $79,420.60, the earnings of Le Colonial, a Vietnamese restaurant she
used to work for.
Ofelia Isabel F. Jeans, 35 years old, looked shaken
when she heard the verdict and sentence meted on her by Magistrate Vivian Ho. She
tried to ask for permission to call her family after her sentencing, but the
magistrate firmly said, “No” and told Jeans to course her requests through her
lawyer.
Jeans could be heard sobbing loudly after she was
led away from the courtroom to begin her sentence. She was earlier allowed to post
a $2,000 bail while her case was being heard.
The restaurant owner who gave testimony and was in
court for the verdict, said afterwards that he felt sad about what happened, especially
as Jeans has a 16-year-old daughter she is raising alone.
“I do not feel happy about this,” he said. “But we
gave her enough chance to settle this matter between us, and she ignored us.”
Initially, Magistrate Ho asked if she should ask a
probation officer to look after Jeans’ daughter who was said to have been left
alone at home, but when she did not get a positive response from the defendant,
dropped the idea.
She was also left unmoved by the defense request for
a community service or fine as sentence, saying the offence committed by Jeans
involved a serious breach of trust, especially as the owner had trusted her to
the extent that she was left to handle the restaurant’s cash earnings on a
day-to-day basis.
The defense had tried to argue that a custodial
sentence would tarnish Jeans’ 14-year record in the F&B industry, and leave
her daughter unable to fend for herself.
The magistrate used seven months’ imprisonment as a starting
point in sentencing, and gave only a month’s discount for the $42,450 that was
returned to the restaurant, made up of $30,000 that the defendant voluntarily
returned, and the $10,450 owed her as her last salary after being fired.
The prosecutor had sought to get a compensation order
for $38,970 from Jeans to cover the balance of the amount that she stole, but
Ho declined the request after being told that the defendant would have no means
to repay that because she was going to jail.
The court heard earlier that Jeans had taken up a
job as an assistant manager in a Tsim Sha Tsui restaurant for which she was
paid $24,000 a month.
Jeans was initially charged with stealing a total of
$83,976.60 cash from Le Colonial restaurant on Paterson St. in Causeway Bay
from Mar. 14 to Sept 13, 2022, when she was fired by the owner for poor
performance. An updated accounting showed the actual loss to be slightly lower,
at around $79,400.
When the company accountant saw the amount of money
that was missing the next day, he told the owner not to give Jeans her final
pay. The owner then sent messages to the defendant via WhatsApp, offering to meet
with her so they could settle the case between them. However, the defendant
largely ignored the messages initially, saying she was ill, or no one would be left
with her daughter at home, and other excuses.
On Sept. 15, 2022, the owner told Jeans that if she
would not settle, he would have no choice but to go to the
police. Jeans then agreed to meet up with the owner and the company accountant,
and brought with her $30,000, saying it was all the money from the restaurant
that she had taken home and intended to hand over.
But she did sign a document agreeing to return the
balance of the money that she took from the restaurant. Afterwards, she sent
several text messages to the owner, thanking him for keeping the matter private.
Despite this, she did not comply with her
undertaking, so the owner was forced to report the matter to the police.
In court, Jeans had tried to challenge the validity of
the document she signed in which she promised to return the balance of the missing amount,
saying she was forced to sign it because of the owner’s threat to call in the police.
She also insisted she did not steal anything and that
the $30,000 that she returned was all that was left with her as part of her task
of keeping a certain amount each day in the restaurant for emergency purchases.
In dismissing these claims, the magistrate said she
did not accept that Jeans was threatened in any way into signing the document,
or that she did not understand its contents. She said the owner had merely stated a fact when he said the police would be called if the defendant did not agree to settle the matter privately.
The magistrate also found Jeans to be a dishonest and
unreliable witness, while the owner and the accountant who both gave evidence,
were truthful and reliable.
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