Shell oil heist: Bunker clerk jailed for helping to receive misappropriated fuel worth $17m
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The man pleaded guilty to 12 charges of facilitating the receipt of misappropriated fuel.
ST PHOTO: KELVIN CHNG
SINGAPORE – A former bunker clerk who helped to misappropriate more than 27,000 tonnes of fuel worth more than $17.5 million was jailed on Oct 22.
Alan Tan Cheng Chuan, 53, pleaded guilty to 12 charges of facilitating the receipt of misappropriated fuel and was sentenced to five years and 10 months’ jail. Another eighteen charges were taken into consideration for sentencing.
Tan, who was working for Sentek Marine & Trading, committed the offences over a total of 43 occasions between September 2014 and November 2017.
The company was involved in buying and selling fuels, with Tan assigned to a bunkering vessel called Sentek 26.
The vessel was used to misappropriate fuel from Shell Eastern Petroleum’s Pulau Bukom facility by a group of rogue employees.
Court documents stated the rogue Shell employees secretly pumped additional gasoil onboard Sentek’s vessels when they came to Pulau Bukom. This gasoil was sold to Sentek, which agreed to purchase it at 60 per cent of the prevailing estimated market value.
At a later date, the purchase price was raised to 62.5 per cent of the prevailing estimated market value.
Their crimes came to light when a Shell representative made a police report after the company suffered an unidentified loss of gasoil worth about $2.98 million in August 2017.
Gasoil is refined crude oil and is often used as fuel and an alternative to diesel in some countries.
The Shell employees were sentenced in 2024
Court documents stated that Tan and Wong Kuin Wah were assigned as bunker clerks to Sentek 26 in 2013. Wong was sentenced to seven years and six months’ jail
A manager in charge of Sentek’s operations, Ng Hock Teck, told Tan and Wong they would be helping the company receive the misappropriated fuel on board the vessel.
They would be paid $10 for every tonne of fuel unlawfully received, which would be equally shared between Tan and Wong.
Ng relied on the duty rosters of the rogue Shell employees to identify the dates for Sentek 26 to make trips to Pulau Bukom to receive the official loading and the illegal loading.
Nearer the loading dates, the bunker clerks, on Ng’s instructions, would inform Shell of the desired time slots to receive official loadings.
Once Sentek 26 was berthed at a wharf on Pulau Bukom, at least one of the rogue Shell employees would board the vessel to provide an estimate of the misappropriated gasoil it would receive alongside the official loading. The bunker clerk on board Sentek 26 would then facilitate the receipt of both the official and illegal loadings.
Tan thus knew he would be helping Sentek acquire misappropriated gasoil, and understood that this was approved by management.
The prosecution initially asked for seven years’ jail for Tan, on the grounds that he played an instrumental role in facilitating the receipt of the misappropriated gasoil.
“The quantity and value of gasoil he assisted were immense. However, the prosecution accepts that this must be balanced against his relatively low position within Sentek, his guilty plea and his agreement to disgorge the entirety of his criminal benefits.”
Tan received criminal benefits of more than $274,000 during the period of his offences.
Following the sentencing of Wong Kuin Wah and another bunker clerk, Wong Wai Meng on Jan 10, 2025, the prosecution later asked for a sentence of six years instead, citing that Tan’s sentence should be consistent with the two former bunker clerks, given their similar levels of culpability.
Wong Wai Meng was given seven years, four months and two weeks’
They also noted that Tan had disgorged the criminal benefits he received from his offences, whereas the other two did not.
