Woman sentenced and fined for stealing and selling employer's jewelry
A woman was sentenced to two years and six months in prison after stealing jewelry from her company and selling it for a total of 1.71 million yuan (US$265,000), the Jing'an District's procuratorate said today.
A fine of 50,000 yuan was also imposed by the Jing'an People's court on June 30.
The Jing'an procuratorate initiated a public prosecution on June 23 against the 30-year-old woman surnamed Zhou for the crime of embezzlement, as she stole and sold about two kilograms of platinum rings and 85 diamonds.
Zhou worked in a Shanghai-based jewelry chain company's commodity department. She was in charge of the company's storage and dispatch of goods and recycling old rings from customers.
After discovering the company did not count and lock the old rings, she stole some of the rings and traded them online to a man surnamed Lin in July of 2019.
The company did not notice the first time she stole rings. She then began to successively sell recycled rings to Lin once or twice a month, from dozens to more than a hundred pieces each time, involving more than 200,000 yuan.
Last November, the company discovered that many recycled old rings were missing. It issued a notification to ask the 'mole' to return the rings before December 25.
In order to make up for the shortfall, Zhou once again used her position to collect 85 diamonds (worth 1.48 million yuan) from the company's stores across the country in the name of holding an exhibition in Beijing. After that she sold the diamonds to Lin again, and convinced him to transfer 800,000 yuan to the company's account. She then sent an anonymous email to the general manager saying the ring she took had been sold, and the money (800,000 yuan) has been transferred to the company's account.
At the beginning of this year, the company found the diamonds were missing. On February 20, she voluntarily surrendered to the public security organ and confessed her crime.
The procurators reminded the company's employees to increase their legal awareness and refrain from illegally embezzling the company's property. In addition, companies should strengthen personnel and financial management, improve warehousing supervision and enhance corporate culture and legal education among employees.