Man charged with engaging in conspiracy to cheat three banks in Singapore

SINGAPORE - A Singaporean man has been accused of working with an alleged accomplice to cheat multiple banks here between 2014 and 2016.

On Thursday (Dec 30), Simon Peter Sim, 53, was charged with five counts of engaging in a conspiracy with a Russian man, Vadim Koryagin, to cheat DBS Bank, Maybank Singapore and OCBC Bank.

In a statement, the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) said that between June 2014 and July 2016, Sim allegedly abetted Koryagin on several occasions to cheat the three banks by fraudulently concealing information relating to the ownership of three companies - Asia IT, Neo World and Simpex Group.

As a result, the banks are said to have been wrongfully induced to open accounts for these firms without such information.

According to court documents, Sim had allegedly duped the banks into the believing he was the ultimate beneficial owner of the three companies.

Sometime in May 2016, Sim allegedly abetted Koryagin to dupe DBS Bank into believing that a fourth firm known as Alfasian had no nominee shareholder.

Because of this, the CPIB said, the bank was wrongfully induced "to open (an account) for this company without information on the nominee shareholder, which was likely to cause harm to DBS Bank's reputation".

Sim is expected to plead guilty to his charges in February next year.

In September this year, Koryagin, then 53, was sentenced to four weeks' jail after he colluded with another Singaporean man - Andruew Tang You Liang - to cheat two banks in 2014 and 2016.

Koryagin and Tang, then 32, were convicted of three counts of cheating each earlier this year. Tang was sentenced to two weeks' jail in September.

The pair were charged in 2019 for their offences, which entailed circumventing the banks' anti-money laundering procedures.

District Judge Eddy Tham had noted in September that there was no evidence of illicit funds involved in the pair's cases.

Tang had led OCBC into believing that he was the ultimate beneficial owner of two firms, the Babo Group and Evoque Capital Corp.

He had also deceived Maybank Singapore into believing that he was the ultimate beneficial owner of a bank account for a company called Sensetec.

Koryagin was a director in MEA Business Solutions, which helped foreign clients incorporate companies and set up bank accounts in Singapore.

In another statement earlier this year, the CPIB said that the Russian had a pool of Singaporeans whom he engaged to serve as local resident directors for these firms.

This was done to fulfil the regulatory requirement of having at least one director in the firm who is ordinarily a Singapore resident.

Appointing resident nominee directors is allowed under the law, but the pair's crime was in declaring to the banks that Tang controlled the companies when in fact they had foreign owners.

The CPIB had earlier said: "Vadim would register each company with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (Acra) in the name of the local resident director and list them as the sole shareholder of the company in Acra's records.

"Vadim would also instruct the local resident director to open a corporate bank account for the company in certain instances."

He had also abetted Tang to falsely declare himself to the banks as the ultimate beneficial owner of the companies and bank account in question.

For each count of cheating, an offender can be jailed for up to three years and fined.