Two years after being hailed as best chief financial officer at the Singapore Corporate Awards, Chan Chee Kin fell from grace after being caught taking upskirt videos of women.
Yesterday, the 42-year-old former chief financial officer at listed Midas Holdings was jailed for four weeks after pleading guilty last week to using his mobile phone to record the videos.
Chan had insulted the modesty of women four times in Orchard Road on June 21 last year. He pleaded guilty to two counts - committed at 313@Somerset and Dhoby Ghaut MRT station - and had two other similar charges, committed at Lucky Plaza and Orchard MRT station, taken into consideration for sentencing.
Investigations showed Chan was at 313@Somerset mall when he saw the first victim at 1.25pm that day. He turned on the video recording app on his mobile phone and stood behind the victim on the upriding escalator before recording a 2½-minute upskirt video.
At about 2.40pm, he was at Dhoby Ghaut MRT station when he saw another woman on an escalator and recorded a video lasting 52 seconds. He followed her to Cold Storage supermarket at Plaza Singapura and took seven videos from 2.43pm to 2.51pm. A Cold Storage employee called the police at about 3pm, saying they had detained a man for taking upskirt shots of women.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Lee Zu Zhao had sought a jail sentence of at least four weeks on each charge. He told District Judge Adam Nakhoda that Chan demonstrated persistence in following each victim, filming them multiple times.
In mitigation, Chan's lawyer Anand Nalachandran said his client suffered from a persistent depressive disorder that had gone undiagnosed for five years. Chan, now unemployed, had been receiving psychiatric treatment and pastoral counselling, said the lawyer.
Judge Nakhoda noted that in both cases, Chan followed the victims to film them. A message had to be sent that Chan's actions could not be condoned.
Chan could have been jailed for up to one year and/or fined on each charge of insulting modesty.
