CHANNELNEWS EXCLUSIVE: A major corruption scandal has been exposed at Chinese Company Hisense Australia, with leaked internal documents claiming that large loopholes in the internal controls of the local subsidiary led to a claimed $3.37M fraud by a former employee.
Senior executives of the Chinese Company were told during a specially initiated internal corruption conference that “fraud and corruption cases among employees at Hisense Australia and Hisense Austria” had been exposed.
ChannelNews knows the name of the former employee who stands accused of engaging in a fraud at the Australian operation.
Documents obtained by ChannelNews that appeared on an internal server in China and Australia claim the former employee, whose LinkedIn page claims she worked for Hisense for nine years, opened more than 30 bank accounts while employed at Hisense.
The document claims the individual “Counterfeited consumer complaints, fabricated and tampered with CRM system records, invented fictitious compensation amounts and took advantage of her position to collect consumer compensation from the Company over a six-year period”.
The document went on to claim that “The number of payments involved exceeded 1,200 and the amount of the fraud was as high as $3.37M”.
When ChannelNews spoke to the former employee, and we put it too them that the amount stolen from the Company was as high as $3.37M, they said, “If it had been that much I would not still be in Australia.”
During the corruption conference, executives were told, “This case reflects that there are large loopholes in the internal controls of Hisense Australia.”
They claim that staff were “not rotated for a long time” and the lack of reviews and supervision had led to the “long-term existence of fraud”.
Hisense Australia claims the employee had “seriously deviated from Hisense’s core values of honesty and integrity” and that she “has slipped into irreversible crime for personal desires”.
It was claimed that Hisense Australia had filed civil lawsuits and criminal charges against the individual.
The former employee denies she has been charged for fraud offences.
On Wednesday the 3rd of February 2021, Ran Sun, the HR and Admin Manager at Hisense Australia, sent an email to key staff claiming the executive management team at Hisense Australia had effective immediately dismissed one (Name withheld by ChannelNews) and that she had been dismissed because of serious misconduct.
Ray Sun HR and Admin Manager wrote the email to staff re dismissal.
“We have zero-tolerance for any fraud and ignorance of the company’s policies,” Ran Sun wrote.
It was also announced that Gary Virk was being appointed as acting Call Centre Manager to be responsible for the daily management of the call centre team, direct reporting to Finn Zhang, the Managing Director.
The Return Team will be charged by Jerry Zhou, the Service Operation Manager.
In the same email it was announced that Andrew Taylor has taken voluntary redundancy as IT Support & Service Agent Team Leader. He is now Whitegoods Service Supervisor at Hisense archival TCL AUS.NZ.
ChannelNews is still waiting for an answer from the Victoria Police Fraud Squad as to whether a complaint of fraud or theft has been lodged with them relating to the individual they are accusing of stealing up to $3.37M.
Hisense Australia said via their PR Company “We will not be commenting on any criminal investigation.”
Tomorrow we will reveal internal documents as to how a former Hisense Financial Manager “instructed the credit controller to tamper with the due date of 1,002 invoices of retail customers”. At the time, recievables from retailers was blowing out to 156 days.
