Procomp fraudster begins 14-year prison term
Taiwan news sources have reported that Sophie Yeh, the disgraced former chairwoman of Procomp Informatics, has been handed a 14-year prison sentence after being found guilty of embezzlement and violation of Taiwanese securities law.
Yeh, who established the Hsinchu Science Park GaAs foundry business in 1991, has already spent several months behind bars following the financial scandal that engulfed Procomp in June 2004 (see related story).
According to the local Taipei Times newspaper, 27 other executives of the company, which housed both MBE and MOCVD fabrication techniques, were also convicted at the Shihlin District Court.
On top of the jail sentence, it is reported that Yeh received a fine of NT$180 million ($5.4 million), although this pales into insignificance compared with the alleged scale of the fraud, which involved "missing" liquid assets of up to NT$6.3 billion.
The fraud, said to have begun in 1994, was only uncovered a decade later when Procomp defaulted on a NT$3 billion bond payment.
According to prosecutors, reports eTaiwan News, that was because Yeh managed to cover up the illegal operation by first ordering Procomp employees to falsify shipment records, and then persuading them not to reveal the scam with large cash handouts.
Last year, Compound Semiconductor magazine learned from a senior source close to the Procomp business that the commpany has shipped products to branch companies in the US with false invoices. "In other words, they did not have real sales and did not ship the products at all," revealed the source.
The eTaiwan News report added that Yeh avoided most of the questions aimed at her during her prosecution by pleading that she was suffering from depression or could not remember what had happened.
The former Procomp chief, who once presided over what was regarded as Taiwan's biggest GaAs chipmaker, would now appear to have plenty of time to recall the incidents that left 1600 company shareholders with massive financial losses.
