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https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/singapore-money-laundering-scandal-endemic
Paywalled and for some ppl in SG depending on your internet service provider also blocked by SG gov, but will copypasta here.
Between 2020 and 2022, Singapore police investigated more than 19,000 suspected “money mules” who might be using their accounts to move drug money. About 250 were prosecuted, police told local media. Somehow, however, while authorities found the time to investigate 19,000 suspected money mules, they appear to have been unable for a much longer time to find Marimutu Sinivasan, Ulung Bursa, Atang Latief, Lidia Muchtar, Omar Putiray, Adisaputra, James Januardi and Agus Anwar.
Those were the names of eight former Indonesian bankers who, according to Tempo Magazine in 2007, were believed to have stashed US$191.2 million in Singaporean banks and were living in the island republic. In fact, 18,000 Indonesians described as “rich” were living in Singapore worth a combined total of US$87 billion – more than Indonesia’s entire annual government budget. The Indonesians wanted their money and their bankers back. They never got them. Today, that figure is believed to have grown into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with nearly 40,000 high net worth Indonesians living in the country. While only a relatively small number may have moved stolen money across the Malacca Strait, there are plenty that should have raised suspicions under international Know Your Customer strictures recommended by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the primary global standard setter for bank regulation.
And Indonesians are far from alone. As has been reported numerous times, Zimbabwe’s former President Robert Mugabe, the late Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos, the jailed Taiwanese President Chen Shui Bian, the disgraced former French Budget Minister Jérôme Cahuzac, the now-deposed former Myanmar strongman Thien Sein, the jailed former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and many more have been identified as keeping stolen money in Singapore banks with impunity.
The Singapore government on August 22 denied that the August 15 arrests of 10 foreign nationals, all of ultimate Chinese origin despite holding varied passports, for forgery and money laundering were a result of a visit by China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, or pressure from China. Authorities threatened Kenneth Jeyaratnam, the leader of the opposition Reform Party, with prosecution under the country's Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, better known as POFMA, for repeating a suspicion that is common among Singaporeans, and demanded a correction. The 10 were apparently wanted by Chinese authorities, Certainly, while there is no evidence that Wang Yi was visiting to push the Singaporean government into going after Chinese crooks, the visit does display the auspiciousness of excellent timing. And, as with the Indonesians living in Singapore and pouring stolen money through the country's banking system, there is ample reason to ask whether it takes foreign intervention to move the government to go after money launderers.
Singapore’s tiny, cowed opposition has shown no indication it will pose embarrassing questions for the government in parliament. “The opposition still want to use the term “alternative” in case they are seen as anti-PAP. As you can see they’re trying to intimidate the rest of the Opposition with POFMAs and defamation suits,” Jeyaretnam said in an email. The closest and most recent questioning of the government regarding money laundering occurred in July 2023, when Workers Party MP Gerald Giam asked Lawrence Wong, the deputy prime minister and finance minister, regarding background checks on foreign nationals before they set up Singapore-registered companies.
Wong issued a statement saying the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority would investigate ‘if it receives information that a company is not conducting activities in line with what was declared at incorporation. The company will be referred to the police if it is suspected to be engaging in illegal activities. To facilitate this, ACRA also makes publicly available much of the information lodged by companies. This helps to ensure that members of the public accessing this information can report any discrepancies.”
That was barely a month before the latest money laundering bust, of which one suspect apparently bought his way into Singapore in 2021 by buying up 20 percent of a well-known but struggling seafood company's shares (Su Haijin, No Signboard Seafood). This raises questions about whether proper scrutiny or due diligence has been done by publicly-listed companies on the SGX towards new investors, especially when they are in dire financial straits. Most of the firms linked to the 10 people arrested here last Tuesday apparently couldn’t be located, despite being listed as “live.”
Singapore subscribes to the Basel Institute on Governance guidelines on anti-money laundering and counter financing of terrorism. But despite that, “it shows significant weaknesses in its effective implementation, according to 2016 review by the Financial Action Task Force, which found that the government‘s AML/CFT coordination “is highly sophisticated and inclusive of all relevant competent authorities. Authorities have a reasonable understanding of their ML/TF risks, and are taking steps to mitigate them.”
The question is why, if the financial authorities’ coordination is “highly sophisticated and inclusive,” it hasn't done more to counter the practices that have brought it such opprobrium for allowing its banking system to be used by people determined to hide billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains.
This dates back to at least the early 1980s, according to Jeyaratnam. “In 1983 there was a lawsuit about $600 million stashed in Singapore by the former head of the Indonesian oil company Pertamina. It was an open secret that Singapore welcomed stolen money from Indonesia and the rest of the region,” he said in an email. “I remember they brought in banking secrecy laws around the same time to protect these illicit deposits from foreign scrutiny. Singapore was copying Switzerland. The general feeling at the time was that Singapore was doing something clever in taking in all this black money and I think the same attitude prevails today.”
Singapore's desire to compete with Switzerland and Hong Kong in attracting private wealth has resulted in the entrenchment of a culture of commissions-based financial greed. Individual agents dealing with rich individuals are not legally empowered or compelled to do anything beyond simply flagging up suspicious irregularities or financial origins to their respective agencies or companies. Many will not do so for fear of risking their commissions. As a property agent told CNA: "Buyers will take their business elsewhere if agents do not agree, saying that "if you don't want to do (it), other agents will do it". The checks are failing “because you want it to fail," he said of the due diligence process. "Human beings are driven by greed, and greed will overcome all forms of propriety."
Singapore is encouraged to conduct comprehensive money-laundering and terrorist financing risk assessments for all types of legal persons (private companies, public companies, foreign companies, etc.) and legal arrangements, according to the Basel report, which “encourages Singapore to further strengthen its investigative and prosecutorial actions on foreign predicate ML cases, in line with the country’s geographical location and its status as a global financial center.” It also notes that “Singapore should strengthen its criminal justice measures against terrorism financing in line with its risks and should continue to emphasize the pursuit of confiscation of proceeds of crime as a separate strategic goal.”
Countries find themselves under more pressure to demonstrate that they actually enforce their laws, the report adds. While receiving high marks for implementing money laundering laws but rated the government “mediocre overall” due to their ineffective measures in enforcing them.
The government is described as “vulnerable to the misuse by criminals of a range of corporate structures and legal arrangements available in the jurisdiction, i.e. offshore companies and trusts.” The Financial Action Task Force, the global money-laundering and terrorist financing watchdog, which sets international standards on financial crimes, criticized Singapore, saying it should enhance its understanding of the risks associated with such structures. The FATF evaluators pointed out that no legal entity had ever been convicted for money laundering. The August 15 busts hopefully will change that, whether Wang Yi caused it or not.
Paywalled and for some ppl in SG depending on your internet service provider also blocked by SG gov, but will copypasta here.
Between 2020 and 2022, Singapore police investigated more than 19,000 suspected “money mules” who might be using their accounts to move drug money. About 250 were prosecuted, police told local media. Somehow, however, while authorities found the time to investigate 19,000 suspected money mules, they appear to have been unable for a much longer time to find Marimutu Sinivasan, Ulung Bursa, Atang Latief, Lidia Muchtar, Omar Putiray, Adisaputra, James Januardi and Agus Anwar.
Those were the names of eight former Indonesian bankers who, according to Tempo Magazine in 2007, were believed to have stashed US$191.2 million in Singaporean banks and were living in the island republic. In fact, 18,000 Indonesians described as “rich” were living in Singapore worth a combined total of US$87 billion – more than Indonesia’s entire annual government budget. The Indonesians wanted their money and their bankers back. They never got them. Today, that figure is believed to have grown into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with nearly 40,000 high net worth Indonesians living in the country. While only a relatively small number may have moved stolen money across the Malacca Strait, there are plenty that should have raised suspicions under international Know Your Customer strictures recommended by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the primary global standard setter for bank regulation.
And Indonesians are far from alone. As has been reported numerous times, Zimbabwe’s former President Robert Mugabe, the late Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos, the jailed Taiwanese President Chen Shui Bian, the disgraced former French Budget Minister Jérôme Cahuzac, the now-deposed former Myanmar strongman Thien Sein, the jailed former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and many more have been identified as keeping stolen money in Singapore banks with impunity.
The Singapore government on August 22 denied that the August 15 arrests of 10 foreign nationals, all of ultimate Chinese origin despite holding varied passports, for forgery and money laundering were a result of a visit by China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, or pressure from China. Authorities threatened Kenneth Jeyaratnam, the leader of the opposition Reform Party, with prosecution under the country's Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act, better known as POFMA, for repeating a suspicion that is common among Singaporeans, and demanded a correction. The 10 were apparently wanted by Chinese authorities, Certainly, while there is no evidence that Wang Yi was visiting to push the Singaporean government into going after Chinese crooks, the visit does display the auspiciousness of excellent timing. And, as with the Indonesians living in Singapore and pouring stolen money through the country's banking system, there is ample reason to ask whether it takes foreign intervention to move the government to go after money launderers.
Singapore’s tiny, cowed opposition has shown no indication it will pose embarrassing questions for the government in parliament. “The opposition still want to use the term “alternative” in case they are seen as anti-PAP. As you can see they’re trying to intimidate the rest of the Opposition with POFMAs and defamation suits,” Jeyaretnam said in an email. The closest and most recent questioning of the government regarding money laundering occurred in July 2023, when Workers Party MP Gerald Giam asked Lawrence Wong, the deputy prime minister and finance minister, regarding background checks on foreign nationals before they set up Singapore-registered companies.
Wong issued a statement saying the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority would investigate ‘if it receives information that a company is not conducting activities in line with what was declared at incorporation. The company will be referred to the police if it is suspected to be engaging in illegal activities. To facilitate this, ACRA also makes publicly available much of the information lodged by companies. This helps to ensure that members of the public accessing this information can report any discrepancies.”
That was barely a month before the latest money laundering bust, of which one suspect apparently bought his way into Singapore in 2021 by buying up 20 percent of a well-known but struggling seafood company's shares (Su Haijin, No Signboard Seafood). This raises questions about whether proper scrutiny or due diligence has been done by publicly-listed companies on the SGX towards new investors, especially when they are in dire financial straits. Most of the firms linked to the 10 people arrested here last Tuesday apparently couldn’t be located, despite being listed as “live.”
Singapore subscribes to the Basel Institute on Governance guidelines on anti-money laundering and counter financing of terrorism. But despite that, “it shows significant weaknesses in its effective implementation, according to 2016 review by the Financial Action Task Force, which found that the government‘s AML/CFT coordination “is highly sophisticated and inclusive of all relevant competent authorities. Authorities have a reasonable understanding of their ML/TF risks, and are taking steps to mitigate them.”
The question is why, if the financial authorities’ coordination is “highly sophisticated and inclusive,” it hasn't done more to counter the practices that have brought it such opprobrium for allowing its banking system to be used by people determined to hide billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains.
This dates back to at least the early 1980s, according to Jeyaratnam. “In 1983 there was a lawsuit about $600 million stashed in Singapore by the former head of the Indonesian oil company Pertamina. It was an open secret that Singapore welcomed stolen money from Indonesia and the rest of the region,” he said in an email. “I remember they brought in banking secrecy laws around the same time to protect these illicit deposits from foreign scrutiny. Singapore was copying Switzerland. The general feeling at the time was that Singapore was doing something clever in taking in all this black money and I think the same attitude prevails today.”
Singapore's desire to compete with Switzerland and Hong Kong in attracting private wealth has resulted in the entrenchment of a culture of commissions-based financial greed. Individual agents dealing with rich individuals are not legally empowered or compelled to do anything beyond simply flagging up suspicious irregularities or financial origins to their respective agencies or companies. Many will not do so for fear of risking their commissions. As a property agent told CNA: "Buyers will take their business elsewhere if agents do not agree, saying that "if you don't want to do (it), other agents will do it". The checks are failing “because you want it to fail," he said of the due diligence process. "Human beings are driven by greed, and greed will overcome all forms of propriety."
Singapore is encouraged to conduct comprehensive money-laundering and terrorist financing risk assessments for all types of legal persons (private companies, public companies, foreign companies, etc.) and legal arrangements, according to the Basel report, which “encourages Singapore to further strengthen its investigative and prosecutorial actions on foreign predicate ML cases, in line with the country’s geographical location and its status as a global financial center.” It also notes that “Singapore should strengthen its criminal justice measures against terrorism financing in line with its risks and should continue to emphasize the pursuit of confiscation of proceeds of crime as a separate strategic goal.”
Countries find themselves under more pressure to demonstrate that they actually enforce their laws, the report adds. While receiving high marks for implementing money laundering laws but rated the government “mediocre overall” due to their ineffective measures in enforcing them.
The government is described as “vulnerable to the misuse by criminals of a range of corporate structures and legal arrangements available in the jurisdiction, i.e. offshore companies and trusts.” The Financial Action Task Force, the global money-laundering and terrorist financing watchdog, which sets international standards on financial crimes, criticized Singapore, saying it should enhance its understanding of the risks associated with such structures. The FATF evaluators pointed out that no legal entity had ever been convicted for money laundering. The August 15 busts hopefully will change that, whether Wang Yi caused it or not.
