Warehouse manager 'stuffed' thousands of cartons of milk with bricks.

On January 18th, the Hanoi City People's Court opened a first-instance criminal trial to hear the case against defendant Nguyen Huy Hoang (42 years old, residing in Thanh Xa commune, district) who was prosecuted for the crime of abusing trust to appropriate property.

According to the indictment of the Hanoi People's Procuracy, in August 2013, Hoang was assigned by Mesa Service and Trading Company Limited (hereinafter referred to as Mesa Company), headquartered in Hai Ba Trung district, Hanoi, to manage two warehouses, one in Hoang Mai district (Hanoi) and one in My Hao district (Hung Yen).

Defendant Hoang at the trial.

Hoang's daily duties included managing the receipt and dispatch of goods (primarily canned milk), according to the bills of lading and documents of Mesa Company. According to regulations, Hoang was only allowed to dispatch goods after receiving a warehouse release form from the company. However, taking advantage of his assigned warehouse management duties, in mid-2014, Hoang took samples of the company's milk and offered them for sale to numerous distributors in Hanoi at a price lower than the usual selling price.

Accordingly, whenever Hoàng ran out of money for personal expenses or when the distributors called for orders, he would hire someone to drive a truck carrying Mesa Company's milk to sell.

To avoid detection during inventory checks, Hoang would place bricks in the positions of the tampered milk cartons and use the remaining cartons to surround them. On occasions when the amount of milk in the warehouse was too low to camouflage the theft with broken bricks, Hoang would call several distributors to buy back their goods and restock the warehouse. Once the inventory was complete, he would calmly hire people to transport the company's milk and sell it as if it were his own.

Using this method, from mid-2014 to the end of 2015, Hoang embezzled 2,411 cartons of various types of milk from Mesa Company's two warehouses, equivalent to more than 1.7 billion VND. The act of abusing trust to misappropriate assets was only discovered on December 2, 2015, when Mesa Company conducted a general inventory and counted each carton of milk in the warehouses.

Explaining his motive for the crime, Hoang confessed that he frequently gambled on lottery games with a woman in the Hoang Van Thu Industrial Zone, Hoang Mai District, which led to losses and debts. Therefore, when pressured by the lottery operator to repay the debt, Hoang resorted to gambling.

At the end of the trial, the panel of judges sentenced Hoang to 13 years in prison for the charges against him. In addition to the prison sentence, the court also ordered the defendant to pay more than 1.6 billion VND in compensation to the civil plaintiff.

According to the People's Police Newspaper