Doctor in HIV data leak case gets another 15 months’ jail for injecting man with meth for cash

SINGAPORE — During his trial, Ler Teck Siang told the court that he was using drug utensils to make arts and crafts.

The doctor also said that he was not providing “slamming” services — the practice of administering controlled drugs by injection — but that his customer was seeing him for “sports and prostatic massages”.

These arguments cut no ice with District Judge Christopher Goh, who sentenced Ler to one year and three months’ jail on Thursday (Oct 17).

Ler, who was facing two drug-related charges, is also the man at the heart of a massive leak of confidential data on patients who have the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Singapore.

The 38-year-old will serve this sentence on top of the two years that he began serving in March. His earlier conviction and sentence was for helping his ex-partner, American fraudster Mikhy Farrera-Brochez, cheat on a blood test and for giving false information to the police and Ministry of Health.

Ler, who was the former head of the ministry’s National Public Health Unit, was found guilty on Thursday of administering methamphetamine to his customer Sim Eng Chee and for possessing a syringe used for drug use.

Ler and Sim were arrested on March 2 last year at the Conrad Centennial Hotel. 

The authorities then seized several items from Ler’s bag as well as from a room registered under Sim’s name. They included a used syringe, two straws, a white bottle and three packets of drugs. 

The items were later found to be stained with meth, while the straws were stained with both meth and cocaine.

STRAWS FOR ORIGAMI

During the trial, Sim testified that he got to know Ler on the gay dating mobile application Grindr, where Ler advertised his “slamming” services to earn some extra money. Sim then became Ler’s regular customer. 

Ler, however, said during the trial that he had intended to use the straws to fold “lucky stars” or to make an origami dog, before putting them in a bottle to sell for extra cash.

He gave various explanations for the syringe, first saying that he had used it to dislodge food particles from his teeth, then later saying that he had fished it out from Brochez’s study room in the apartment they shared.

At the time of his drug offences, he was facing criminal charges related to Brochez, who was sentenced to two years’ jail in the US last month for trying to extort the Singapore Government over stolen data of an HIV Registry.

The stolen data, which Brochez leaked online in January, affected 14,200 individuals here.

Ler’s drug charges are unrelated to the data leak.

‘DISINGENUOUS AND ILLOGICAL’

On Thursday, District Judge Goh slammed Ler’s defence as “disingenuous and illogical”, calling his attempts to explain some of the evidence “difficult to accept”.

Ler had told the court that the “G water” he and Sim talked about over text messages was a type of virtual potion used in a mobile game they played. 

The term actually refers to a substance used to “lift the high” of illegal drugs.

References to “coke” were about Coca-Cola instead of cocaine, Ler claimed, as he wanted to use the beverage to make fake blood for a prank.

Ler also referred to a phone text message he had sent Sim on the messaging platform Line, which read: “Sorry I poke you twice before going to the forearm.”

Ler claimed that he was referring to a Facebook poke, and that he had meant “foreman”, referring to one of Sim’s friends.

The judge said that some of these explanations may have been believed individually, but all of them taken together “showed the lengths Ler would go in trying to explain messages detrimental to his case”.

While sentencing Ler, he noted that the doctor had committed the drug offences while out of bail, pending his trial for his earlier set of charges.

Ler still faces two other charges, which the prosecution stood down during the trial. He told the court that he intends to contest them.

They are for failing to provide a urine sample to the Central Narcotics Bureau on March 2 last year and for failing to take reasonable care of confidential information regarding HIV-positive patients under the Official Secrets Act.