Singaporean director in Wirecard case handed 3 more fraud charges

Wirecard filed for bankruptcy in June after acknowledging that 1.9 billion euros it had listed as assets didn't exist. PHOTO: REUTERS

SINGAPORE (BLOOMBERG) - The Singapore authorities added three further fraud charges against the director of a local accounting firm in a case linked to disgraced German payments company Wirecard.

R. Shanmugaratnam, a director of Citadelle Corporate Services, was charged with three counts of falsifying letters from Citadelle erroneously representing that the Singapore accounting firm held certain amounts of cash in escrow accounts.

The additional allegations concern 377.5 million euros (S$611 million) in total, according to charge sheets seen by Bloomberg News, and bring the total number of charges to 14. Taken together, the charges involve about 1.2 billion euros in cash, according to calculations, more than half of the amount missing from the firm, though they cover different time periods.

Citadelle's Shanmugaratnam is the first person to be indicted in Singapore over the spectacular collapse of Wirecard, which has reverberated across the world.

Wirecard filed for bankruptcy in June after acknowledging that 1.9 billion euros it had listed as assets did not exist, triggering a global investigation. Singapore is home to Wirecard's Asia-Pacific headquarters and the company had been expanding aggressively in the region, which accounted for almost 45 per cent of the group's reported revenue in 2018, second only to Europe.

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