SINGAPORE – A former sales agent of a gold investment firm called Genneva, linked to a multi-million dollar investment scam, was sentenced to nine months’ jail on March 13.

While Zhang Jinxia, 58, was not convicted of offences relating to the scam directly, District Judge Shawn Ho had earlier found her guilty on March 6 of cheating a pawnshop by falsely reporting the loss of pawn tickets.

She was also convicted of one count of dealing with the benefits of criminal conduct.

The Singaporean woman intends to appeal against her conviction and sentence, and her bail was set at $45,000 on March 13.

In a statement, the police said that the Singapore-registered investment firm had sold gold bars under a buyback scheme between 2008 and 2012.

Under the scheme, it sold the precious metal to customers and promised returns of up to 36 per cent on their investments with the company over a certain contract period.

The customers were later told to deposit the gold bars with the company for “inspection purposes” and were promised an equivalent quantity of gold after three working days.

Genneva was believed to have collected around 3,500 kg of gold from the customers, but the police did not disclose how many people were involved.

In earlier proceedings, the court heard that the now-defunct firm started defaulting on the return of the gold bars and finally racked up more than $40 million in losses for customers who participated in the “gold inspection” exercise.

Genneva was not in a position to return the gold within the stipulated time frame as it was facing financial difficulties at the time.

According to the police statement, the company’s purchasing head, identified as Choo Chee Loong, was tasked to pawn the gold bars collected from customers under the “gold inspection scheme”.

The police added: “Due to limits on the weight of gold that a person could pawn, Zhang agreed to help Choo to pawn 3kg of gold by falsely stating her name on the pawn tickets as the pawner.

“(After that, Zhang handed) over the loans totalling $168,000 received for the pawned gold, as well as three pawn tickets, to Choo on Aug 24, 2012.”

On Sept 29 that year, Zhang lied to the pawnshop, claiming that the pawn tickets had gone missing.

The pawnshop then gave her ...