Singapore jails Malaysian mastermind for market manipulation

Singapore, Dec 28 (PTI) The Malaysian mastermind behind Singapore’s biggest stock market manipulation, which wiped out nearly SGD8 billion in market value in October 2013, was sentenced to 36 years in jail while his co-conspirator was handed a 20-year jail term by a court here on Wednesday.

John Soh Chee Wen, a 62-year-old prominent Malaysian businessman, and his ex-partner and accomplice Quah Su-Ling, 58, were found to have manipulated the share prices of Blumont Group, Asiasons Capital and LionGold Corp (collectively known as BAL) between August 2012 and October 2013, the Straits Times newspaper reported.

They did it through 187 trading accounts held with 20 financial institutions in the names of 58 individuals and companies.

Both are appealing their sentences, the report said.

Wen and Su-Ling had been convicted of 180 and 169 charges, respectively, in a long-running trial spanning almost 200 days and involving close to 100 prosecution witnesses, Channel News Asia reported.

Wen was additionally found guilty of witness tampering as he asked four witnesses to lie to investigators after the stock market crash, the report said.

Prosecutors had sought a jail sentence of 40 years for Wen and 19.5 years for Su-Ling.

While issuing the sentences, High Court judge Hoo Sheau Peng said the duo perpetrated “a scheme of substantial scale, complexity and sophistication” and added that “immense harm” was caused by the crash, and Wen continued to subvert justice and conceal what they had done even after the scheme failed.

“After an intensive investigation and a complex trial, I have convicted them of a majority of the multiple charges brought against them,” Peng said.

“It is necessary and of utmost importance for the global sentences to be imposed on the accused to capture the gravity of their wrongdoing,” the report quoted the judge as saying.

In deciding Su-Ling’s sentence, Judge Peng said, “In my view, there is no dispute that Quah is less culpable, and she is less involved in terms of the scheme’s conceptualisation and execution… As a starting point for the false trading and price manipulation charges, I will impose on Quah two-thirds of the sentence imposed on Soh.”

Wen has been in remand since November 2016, while Su-Ling is out on bail of SGD 4 million.