<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR>Oct 8, 2008
</TR><!-- headline one : start --><TR>$545m chips fraud <!--10 min-->
</TR><!-- headline one : end --><TR>Recycling firm's boss charged. </TR><!-- show image if available --></TBODY></TABLE>
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ANOTHER fraud and cheating scandal has hit Singapore's corporate world, this time involving sums to the tune of more than half a billion dollars.
The chief of delisted memory chip recycler EC-Asia was on Wednesday hauled into court on 687 charges involving a whopping US$372.2 million (S$545 million) - making this one of the biggest corporate scandals here to date.
From March 2001 to January last year, Kelvin Ang Ah Peng, 43, allegedly cheated an information technology company and six financial institutions of US$290.5 million by trading in worthless chips.
He had worked at the IT company, AsiaPac Distribution, as a sales manager for three years prior to joining EC-Asia. The banks he allegedly cheated included United Overseas Bank, HSBC and Standard Chartered.
Among other things, Ang is being charged with pretending to buy and sell integrated circuit chips, thereby inducing banks to deliver sums of money for these purchases or sales.
This was despite knowing himself that the chips were defective and worthless.
He is also alleged to have conspired with another person to remit US$81.7 million of the company's ill-gotten gains from Hong Kong to Singapore.
Ang has also been charged with falsifying revenues in EC-Asia's initial public offering (IPO) prospectus in 2003. He is said to have overstated the company's revenue by 40 per cent for the 2002 financial year and by 10 per cent for the previous financial year.
The firm was eventually slapped with a stop-order on its initial public offering (IPO) by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in 2003, for reasons not made clear. Read the full story in Thursday's edition of The Straits Times
</TR><!-- headline one : start --><TR>$545m chips fraud <!--10 min-->
</TR><!-- headline one : end --><TR>Recycling firm's boss charged. </TR><!-- show image if available --></TBODY></TABLE>
<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"-->
ANOTHER fraud and cheating scandal has hit Singapore's corporate world, this time involving sums to the tune of more than half a billion dollars.
The chief of delisted memory chip recycler EC-Asia was on Wednesday hauled into court on 687 charges involving a whopping US$372.2 million (S$545 million) - making this one of the biggest corporate scandals here to date.
From March 2001 to January last year, Kelvin Ang Ah Peng, 43, allegedly cheated an information technology company and six financial institutions of US$290.5 million by trading in worthless chips.
He had worked at the IT company, AsiaPac Distribution, as a sales manager for three years prior to joining EC-Asia. The banks he allegedly cheated included United Overseas Bank, HSBC and Standard Chartered.
Among other things, Ang is being charged with pretending to buy and sell integrated circuit chips, thereby inducing banks to deliver sums of money for these purchases or sales.
This was despite knowing himself that the chips were defective and worthless.
He is also alleged to have conspired with another person to remit US$81.7 million of the company's ill-gotten gains from Hong Kong to Singapore.
Ang has also been charged with falsifying revenues in EC-Asia's initial public offering (IPO) prospectus in 2003. He is said to have overstated the company's revenue by 40 per cent for the 2002 financial year and by 10 per cent for the previous financial year.
The firm was eventually slapped with a stop-order on its initial public offering (IPO) by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in 2003, for reasons not made clear. Read the full story in Thursday's edition of The Straits Times
