Human, Plainly

A loan officer from OCBC Bank was charged in court on Thursday, May 12 2011 with conspiring with property agents to deceive the bank into giving housing loans worth more than S$61 million. She faced 189 counts of deceiving the bank between 2004 and 2006 by submiting false income tax or Central Provident Fund statements to secure loans for applicants who did not meet income requirements.


In 2004 a finance manager at Asia Pacific Breweries forged documents to swindle banks out of S$117 million over four years to feed his gambling addiction. He was sentenced to 42 years in jail, the longest jail term meted out for the largest case in commercial fraud in Singapore to date.


For nine months in 2005, a 38 year old clerk managed to siphon half a million dollars by taking advantage of her position and began depositing crossed cheques all of which had been signed by the company's managing director into her personal bank account. For that she was jailed for four years and three months.




A 47 year old lawyer disappeared in June 2006 with $11.3 million of his clients' money. He tried to abscond with cash, gold and diamonds but failed to get away with a big chunk of the loot. He is currently on Interpol's wanted list.


A clerk who worked for SIA for nearly 25 years was jailed 24 years for taking nearly $35 million over a period of 13 years between 1987 and 2000. The fraud was to prepare phantom pay allowances for the airline's cabin crew which he then banked into his own bank account. Had he quit while he was ahead, his crime may never have been discovered.





Seagate's Singapore senior human resource staffing administrator was jailed for seven months for helping a recruitment agency to clinch the contract to source foreign workers for Seagate Technology International in 2007. For this help the HR officer received $140,000 in cash.


A 40 year old director at the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) Technology and Infrastructure Department deceived the SLA into paying monies to his seven sole proprietorships by using fake invoices without delivering any work to the agency. The amount pilfered was also huge – $12 million over a two-year period starting from Jan 2008. The case is in pre-trial conference stage.


A 46 year old monk who was the CEO of a charity-run hospital was charged in court with 10 counts, including forgery, misappropriation of funds and conspiracy to give false information to the Commissioner of Charities. The monk was sentenced to 10 months in jail but had his sentence cut by four months on appeal in the High Court.