SINGAPORE - To boost its poor earnings, a pub along Circular Road set up a "VIP" area for customers in the back. Five waist-high cubicles were hooked up to a smoke machine that could be turned on by hostesses for further privacy - as they performed oral sex on customers for $220 per session.

Besides the set-up in the back of the premises of Kenneth Hideout, Filipino hostesses sourced through an agent would also provide sex for $300 in two-hour sessions conducted elsewhere. The women were paid salaries and commissions based on drinks and sexual services, but were only given this after paying off debts owed to the pub.

On Wednesday, four people were jailed for between one and seven months after pleading guilty to various offences under the Women's Charter. These were committed between June 2010 and June 2012.

The four were pub owner Clement Chan Lye Hua, 56, managers Alan Sin Chee Chew, 50, and Tan Peng Soon, 58, and cashier Nurfahana Jailan, 24.

In sentencing them, a community court noted that all had been "important" in what had been an "extensive" operation.

The joint, set up by Chan in 2008, operated as a regular pub for two months. He brought Sin on board as a manager andtogether, they arranged for the girls to come to Singapore on social visit passes. Either of the men, who were given seven and five months' jail respectively, would pick hostesses up from the airport. Chan would brief them on their job scope.

In April 2012, Tan joined the pub, also as a manager. Besides preparing a daily sales report, he suggested setting up the VIP area. Tan was jailed two months. Nurfahana, meanwhile, joined as a barmaid in 2010 but took over as cashier in April 2012. She received one month in prison.

The maximum penalty for living on the earnings of a prostitute is a jail term of five years and $10,000 in fines. For each count of managing a brothel, each of the four could have been jailed up to three years and fined up to $3,000.