SINGAPORE - Three professionals from the financial sector were charged in court on Wednesday (Oct 23) with cheating, criminal breach of trust and money laundering offences committed between 2009 and last year.
Victims in the three separate cases lost a total of more than $3.6 million, the police said in a statement on Wednesday.
Shen Tsu-kuang, 51, a former director of asset management company Linden Asset Management (Belize), is one of the three people accused.
While the Taiwanese national was the director of Linden Asset Management, a BNP Paribas customer engaged the firm to handle her account with the bank.
Shen had acted as a proxy for the customer, relaying instructions to the bank on her behalf. He allegedly submitted instructions purportedly signed by the BNP Paribas customer to the bank to transfer more than $2.4 million into Linden Asset Management's bank account.
But the customer did not authorise these transfers.
The second person accused, Singaporean Tan Chen Yen, 36, is a former banking operations specialist with Bank Pictet & Cie (Asia).
He was in charge of handling physical cash stored in the bank's safe, and allegedly misappropriated about $1.2 million from the safe.
To avoid detection, he replaced the misappropriated cash with counterfeit and blank notes, and manipulated the bank's accounts.
Meanwhile, the third person accused, Ng Eu Hou, 27, a former loan officer with DBS Bank, allegedly deceived two victims whom he met while attending to their banking-related inquiries.
The Singaporean deceived them into keying in their ATM personal identification numbers to apply for loans amounting to $4,000 in their names, without their consent or knowledge.
When the victims discovered that they had received the loans, he told them that it was an error and advised them to return the amounts to the bank.
He then provided details of his personal bank account, to which his victims transferred the loans.
The police said in their statement that they take a serious view of financial abuse, manipulation and deception by bank employees that compromise the integrity of the banking and financial sector.
