GEIS-新闻详情

Jail for 2 nominee directors whose shell companies laundered almost $20m in scam profits

2023-11-30 00:00:00.0 海峡时报-新加坡原网页

SINGAPORE - Two Singaporean men who were nominee directors of shell companies here were sentenced to jail after their firms inadvertently helped scammers launder almost $20 million.

This sum was mainly from foreign and local companies that were victims of scams, including business e-mail compromise and impersonation scams.

On Nov 30, Bernard Chng Kok Leng and Tay Chee Seng, both 49, were sentenced to six and four weeks’ jail respectively.

Chng pleaded guilty to five charges of failing to exercise reasonable diligence in his duty as director, while Tay pleaded guilty to three of the same offences. Both had similar charges taken into consideration for sentencing.

They were also disqualified from being company directors for five years.

They had contacted corporate secretarial firm Interconnect Consultancy in mid-2020 after seeing job advertisements for nominee directors online.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Janice See said Tay was working odd jobs and earning between $1,000 and $1,600 a month at the time. He needed money to supplement expenses due to the lack of jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Both men went to Interconnect Consultancy’s office to speak to its director, Lee Chia Yen. They voiced concerns that the companies might be used for money laundering.

But Lee and his colleague Lee Ay Ling assured them the firm would do all the necessary checks and they had nothing to worry about.

Lee told the two men that they would receive $250 in director’s fees every six months. He told Tay he could be a director of a new company every day, which would work out to a monthly “income” of $7,500.

Chng was subsequently appointed nominee director of 52 shell companies, while Tay became nominee director of 57 shell companies.

They only had to give their details to Interconnect Consultancy and did not oversee any affairs of the companies, including their bank transactions.

Accounts opened for some of these shell companies, in which the two men were directors, received over US$14.6 million (S$19.5 million) in scam proceeds.

In September 2020, Belgium company Grib Diamond NV transferred US$10 million to a UOB account of one of Chng’s firms, Hang Yi.

It had done so after receiving fraudulent e-mails from their purported “chief executive officer” with instructions to transfer money to Hang Yi.

Within days, the entire sum was remitted to various bank accounts in Hong Kong, China and Singapore. It remains unrecovered to this day.