A former company director sentenced to 30 months' jail in 2017 for criminal breach of trust tried to fake his own death while out on bail. But he was caught at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport last August and brought back to Singapore.
Yesterday, Ng Kek Wee, 55, was sentenced to 18 months' jail after pleading guilty to one count each of abetting to provide false information to a public servant, knowingly failing to turn up in court without reasonable excuse and abetting the fabrication of false evidence in a judicial proceeding.
He will serve his latest sentence after completing his jail term for criminal breach of trust.
The court heard that Ng used to be a director of a firm called Singalab, which provides customised electronic business solutions. After a trial, he was found guilty of misappropriating three million shares of a subsidiary of the firm and was sentenced on May 4, 2017, to 30 months' jail.
He also faced other charges, but they were stood down to be dealt with later. Court documents did not reveal details of these charges.
Ng indicated in 2017 that he wanted to appeal against his conviction and sentence, and was allowed bail. He was also granted permission to leave Singapore for business reasons.
On Feb 18 last year, a pre-trial conference involving the charges that were stood down was held before District Judge Lim Tse Haw.
Acting on instructions from Ng, his unsuspecting lawyer, Mr Lim Chee San, said his client would be returning to Singapore from China where he was purportedly seeking medical treatment.
Judge Lim ordered a copy of Ng's flight ticket to be uploaded onto the State Courts online portal called the Integrated Case Management System (ICMS).
Ng's lawyer later received from his client a bogus electronic ticket itinerary, which indicated he would be arriving in Singapore on March 13 last year, after a stopover in Indonesia. The lawyer then uploaded it onto ICMS on Feb 25.
Meanwhile, Ng travelled to Indonesia and asked a man known as Ali Ruslan to forge a death certificate stating he had died there on March 10 that year. Ali Ruslan e-mailed the forged document to Mr Lim Chee San, who tendered it during the appeal hearing five days later.
In a statement yesterday, the Singapore Police Force said the Commercial Affairs Department had checked Ng's purported death and officers found that he had travelled to Malaysia on several occasions after March 10 last year.
With assistance from the Royal Malaysian Police, he was arrested in Kuala Lumpur about five months later and brought back to Singapore.