Fugitive Charles Yeo struck off rolls; court finds him ‘thoroughly unfit’ to be a lawyer

SINGAPORE – Fugitive lawyer Charles Yeo, who

fled Singapore in 2022

while on bail for criminal charges, has been struck off the rolls.

The Law Society of Singapore had brought five sets of disciplinary proceedings against Yeo, who was admitted to the Bar in August 2016.

Three of the complaints were separately lodged by migrant workers after the settlement money for their workplace injuries was disbursed to a third party as a result of Yeo’s due diligence failures.

The fourth concerned at least 185 breaches of rules governing how lawyers handle money, arising out of Yeo’s mismanagement of clients’ funds and financial records.

The fifth related to misrepresentations he had made to the court while he was representing two death row inmates, as well as Instagram posts he uploaded attacking the legal system.

In a written judgment on Nov 28, the Court of Three Judges agreed with the Law Society that a striking-off was warranted.

“By the totality of the above, he has thereby shown himself to be thoroughly unfit to wear the mantle of membership in this venerable profession of law,” said the court.

The court, which has the power to disbar or suspend errant lawyers, comprised Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, Justice Tay Yong Kwang and Justice Steven Chong.

The Law Society referred Yeo’s case to the court after five disciplinary tribunals, each made up of members of the legal profession, found him guilty of professional misconduct.

Yeo’s failings went far beyond one-off lapses, said the court.

The gross extent of his breaches, both in terms of the quantity of incidents and the quality of his misconduct, unequivocally signified his serious defects of character, it added.

The court said the cumulative effect of all his ethical transgressions paints the picture of a legal practitioner who “held a cavalier disregard” for the safeguards designed to protect clients who entrust lawyers with their money.

Yeo also failed to appreciate a lawyer’s vital function to act with due diligence to safeguard clients’ best interests.

He flouted a lawyer’s most central duty of candour to the court, and consistently conducted himself on a public platform “with such an unbecoming comportment as to bring disrepute to the legal profession”, the court added.

Yeo was arrested on Nov 4, 2024 by

authorities in the United Kingdom

after Singapore sent a request in October 2023 seeking his extradition over an offence of abetment of cheating.

The workplace injury incidents were in respect of three migrant workers from Bangladesh who initially hired another law firm to sue their employers.

The three had never communicated with Yeo or authorised him to act on their behalf.

Yeo relied on a man named Saha Ranjit Chandra as the bridge of communication between himself and the workers.

Letters in which the workers purportedly discharged their previous lawyer and authorised Yeo to act for them were forged, though it is currently unclear who forged the documents.

Acting on unverified instructions, Yeo settled the workers’ claims without their knowledge or authorisation, and disbursed the settlement sums to Ranjit.

Two of the workers received none of the respective settlement sums of $41,821.80 and $30,000.

Most of the money went to Ranjit, and the remainder went to Yeo’s law firm Whitefield Law Corporation as legal costs.

The third worker realised that things were amiss and intervened. But $18,000 of $37,465.40 still ended up being paid to Ranjit, while the worker received only $9,707.25.

Ranjit, an Indian national, has been charged with using Yeo’s name to

dupe two insurance companies into disbursing nearly $77,000 in settlement sums

.

In its judgment, the court said Yeo was grossly negligent in failing to verify that those documents were signed by the workers.

The court said the suspicious circumstances ought to have raised red flags, such as the fact that Ranjit would receive a huge cut of the settlement money.

Yeo’s breaches of solicitors’ accounts rules came to light after an accountancy firm was appointed by the Law Society in February 2022 to inspect the accounting records of Whitefield, in which Yeo was a director.

Yeo eventually provided only some of information requested from him.

The accountancy firm’s report, based on the available information, identified at least 185 breaches between November 2020 and August 2021.

They comprised 61 occasions of money withdrawn from the firm’s client account via cash cheques without the court’s permission, and 51 occasions of sums exceeding $5,000 withdrawn from the client account with only one signatory instead of the required two.

There were also 16 occasions where clients’ money were not deposited into the client account as required but in the office account instead, and another 57 breaches of the requirements concerning financial records and accounting documentation.

The misrepresentations to the court took place after Yeo filed an eleventh-hour application on behalf of two death row inmates who were scheduled to be executed on Feb 16, 2022.

After the criminal review application was dismissed by the Court of Appeal on Feb 15, Yeo filed a civil application in the High Court, seeking judicial review of the legality of their impending executions.

During the hearing, Yeo made three misrepresentations, including telling the judge that one of the prisoners had an IQ of 67, as diagnosed by the Institute of Mental Health (IMH).

However, IMH reports did not contain any such diagnosis.

In a series of posts and stories on Instagram between January and April 2022, Yeo scandalised the judiciary, attacked the integrity of the Attorney-General, and made personal attacks on lawyers.

Among other things, he said the legal system “serves the rich and capital” and that the state started to “frame and fix” him after he tried to help those victimised by the system.

Yeo also accused prosecutors of “fixing up critics on contrived charges” and “forcing intellectually disabled men with IQ of 67” to the gallows.