Sadagopan Premnath is the first Shell employee to admit to the charges. (Representational)
A 40-year-old Indian man on Tuesday pleaded guilty to his involvement in misappropriation of SGD 49 million (USD 36.1 million) worth of gas oil at a multinational refinery in Singapore.
Sadagopan Premnath committed the crime in 2017-18 while working at the Royal-Dutch Shell Eastern Petroleum located on Pulau Bukom island.
Premnath will return to court for mitigation and sentencing in February. The case also involves several other employees at the refinery.
He pleaded guilty to four charges of abetting criminal breach of trust as a servant, while another five charges will be considered in his sentence, according to a report by the Channel News Asia.
Premnath is the first Shell employee involved in the heist to admit to the charges.
He began working with the company around 2012 as a fieldman.
The heist occurred at the manufacturing site on Shell Pulau Bukom, the company's largest wholly-owned refinery in the world in terms of crude oil distillation capacity and its largest petrochemical production and export centre in the Asia Pacific.
The conspiracy to misappropriate gas oil began in 2007 with co-accused Juandi Pungot and Abdul Latif Ibrahim, both Shell employees, and grew to involve more people over 11 years.
Premnath was recruited by Juandi and he joined the syndicate in mid-2017.
His role was to take directions from his co-conspirators and act as a black oil panel man to open and close valves so that awaiting vessels could receive the misappropriated gas oil, the court heard.
He received about USD 150,000 from the criminal proceeds, the court heard.
After the suspected theft of gas oil via unauthorised transfer to other vessels was detected, Shell filed a police report in August 2017.
The cases of others involved in the embezzlement are pending. Several officers from the tankers that received the stolen gas oil from Pulau Bukom have been jailed, including a chief officer who was imprisoned in July last year.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)