SHE got along fairly well with her former colleagues at a clinic and was generous with gifts.

There was only one snag.

Said beauty queen Ris Low's former supervisor: 'She used one of the credit cards (she obtained fraudulently) to buy me a birthday present.

'But the police ordered her to get it back, so she asked me to return the present to her.'

The ex-supervisor, a clinic coordinator who did not want to be named, declined to reveal details of the present.

'We never thought she would do something like that,' she said.

Discouraged

The ex-supervisor said she was disheartened by Ris' dishonesty.

'We all trusted her, and we tried to teach her so many things. We gave her so many chances.

'It was very disappointing - she could have done so much better,' said the 29-year-old woman.

At first, the ex-supervisor could not make the connection between her former colleague and the beauty queen from the photo on the front page of The New Paper on Sunday last month.

The face looked only vaguely familiar.

But the penny dropped after she watched a video of the recently-crowned Miss Singapore World 2009 being interviewed.

It was just over a year ago that Ris had been her subordinate.

Said the former supervisor: 'I didn't recognise her at first because she was wearing a lot of make-up - she never used to wear that much make-up, except fake lashes sometimes.'

She added, however, that she was not surprised Ris would participate in a beauty pageant because she 'loved the attention'.

'Whenever we were out together, she would get approached by talent scouts asking her to model,' she said.

At the time, Ris was working as a patient service assistant at a clinic belonging to a well-known medical group here.

She was convicted of five charges of cheating and misappropriation involving credit cards.

Another 60 charges were taken into consideration for purposes of sentencing, a Subordinate Courts' spokesman told The New Paper.

Said her former supervisor: 'I don't think somebody who did what she did should be allowed to represent Singapore in an international pageant.'

She said Ris' offences were brought to light after patients complained they never got their credit cards back after paying their medical bills.

'It turned out that she had been using the credit cards to buy things for herself.'

This article was first published in The New Paper.