Jail for duo who forged cheques worth S$3.58m

SINGAPORE — They had banked on living the good life in Thailand after netting S$3.58 million by forging cheques of property firm SoilBuild Group Holdings, but secondary school mates Tan Yong Hai and Lau Tien Chen will now spend years behind bars for their failed plot.

For his role as the mastermind, Tan, 31, was sentenced today (June 17) to nine years and three months in jail for eight charges, including forgery and an immigration offence.

His accomplice, Lau, also 31, was sentenced to six years’ jail for two charges of dishonestly using a forged cheque. The prosecution had pressed for 10 years’ jail for Tan and six years’ jail for Lau, calling the former’s conduct shocking.

There has not been a similar case of fraud in recent memory that involves fleeing and returning to the country to commit further offences, said Deputy Public Prosecutor Victor Lim in arguing for a heavy sentence.

The sums of money involved clearly shock the conscience of the public and no restitution has been made, DPP Lim added.

Tan’s misdeeds began in 2011, when he forged lease agreements of his employer’s client. He was then a facility executive of Sodexo, a facilities management company, maintaining buildings of its client, Invensys Process Systems Singapore. He channelled the rent from the forged lease agreements to his unsuspecting parents’ bank accounts.

In January 2012, Tan discovered that Invensys was investigating the forgery of lease agreements, and decided to steal and forge the company’s cheques.

A month later, he escaped to Thailand with S$950,000 of bank notes slipped between pages of hardcover books so that the money would not be detected by airport scanners.

In Thailand, Tan began plotting a bigger operation. He contacted Lau to help apply for accounts-assistant jobs for him in Singapore.

In August 2013, Tan flew back to Singapore using a Thai passport, falsely declaring that he had never used a passport with a different name to enter the Republic.

Tan was hired by SoilBuild, and only then informed Lau of his plan to steal from the company, and convinced his friend to help him.

By his second day at work, Tan had removed three cheques from SoilBuild’s chequebooks, forged the signatures of the company’s top executives and made the cheques out in Lau’s favour.

On Aug 22, 2013, Tan asked Lau to bank in the cheques, and they planned to take the S$3.58 million out the next day. The next day, one of the banks, Maybank, suspected a cheque was forged and alerted SoilBuild’s chief financial officer.

A police report was made and the police froze S$1.4 million in Lau’s Standard Chartered bank account.

Meanwhile on that same day, Tan, while in the office, became aware of the company’s suspicions and arranged to meet Lau to withdraw the money. Staff at Standard Chartered’s Woodlands branch directed Lau to the bank’s main office, where he was arrested.

Tan was arrested as he tried to leave Singapore using his Thai passport. The duo’s lawyer, Ms Diana Ngiam of Quahe Woo & Palmer, had sought seven years’ jail for Tan and four years’ jail for Lau, saying they had cooperated fully with investigations.

In meting out the jail sentences, the judge noted that although Tan was the mastermind, both men were involved in a large part of the offences.