The businessman who pleaded guilty to 20 vice related charges earlier this month, was sentenced to 58 months jail and $90,000 fine on Friday.

Tang Boon Thiew, 39, had recruited 19 escorts, 17 of whom provided sexual services and earned about $371,450. He got half of that.

The only minor was a 17-year-old student whom Tang represented on the website as 18. Her dealings with 51 clients made headlines last year. Tang had asserted that he did not know initially know her actual age and had assumed she was already 18 since she had allegedly told him that she was a polytechnic student. He claimed he came to know her true age a week after she had begun working for him in September 2010.

Yet, for the next 41/2 months he continued to live off her substantial earnings from prostitution by perpetuating the fiction that she was already 18, said Senior District Judge See Kee Oon in his brief oral grounds.

The judge noted a number of aggravating factors in this case such as Tang's active and deliberate deception in relation to the minor's age.The other escorts were between 20 and 47.

The 20 charges he faces include living off the earnings of prostitution, procuring women for prostitution, and abetting clients to obtain the commercial sexual services of a minor. Tang, who ran a company dealing with digital-media advertising plans to appeal against the sentence.