A ubiquitous sight for most of anyone who has immediate access to a computer, the USB pendrive is indisputably an indispensable part of the modern landscape. From keeping family photos safe to private corporate documents, we have the ingenuity of Malaysian Datuk Pua Khein Seng for creating it.
Inventor of the USB pendrive faces 2 years jail
And yet, it has been reported that the technopreneur, who has since built a successful corporate empire for himself, is potentially facing a two-year jail sentence in Taiwan, according to Taiwanese newspaper the Liberty Times.
This was after it had been discovered that the company had been falsifying reports and accounting transactions between the years of 2009 and 2014, which led to discrepancies in bookkeeping. The verdict was passed under Article 171 of the Securities and Exchange Act.
It was claimed that Datuk Pua had falsified the accounting records of his company to reduce the financial costs of setting it up. Investigations into the case started in 2016. As a consequence, he has been meted out with a jail term amounting to one year and 10 months, reports China Press.
In a statement, Datuk Pua has said to members of the press that he will make an appeal against the verdict, and that the operations of his company will not be affected by the ongoing litigation.
A humble boy from Sekinchan
A native of Sekinchan, Selangor, Datuk Pua came from humble beginnings and was an alma mater of Chiao Tung National University in Taiwan, where he studied when he was 19. He rose to prominence after becoming among some of the first individuals to come up with what is now known as the USB pendrive and founding Phison Electronics at only 27-years-old.
However, it is worth noting that the claim that he was the inventor of the USB pendrive is heavily contested among other progenitors of the field, among them include Israeli company M-Systems that patented an “Architecture for a Universal Serial Bus-Based PC Flash Disk” in 1999, and Singaporean company Trek 2000 International, who similarly claims to have sold the first USB pendrive.
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