A FORMER chief financial officer of commodity firm Agritrade International duped 16 financial institutions worldwide into providing her company with millions of dollars in trade financing, causing losses of US$469mil (RM2bil).
The financial institutions, which included major banks in Japan, South Korea, India and Taiwan, incurred the losses between January 2016 and November 2019.
This amount, described by the prosecution as “unprecedented and staggering”, is almost as high as the US$633.3mil (RM2.7bil) victims in Singapore lost to all scams in 2021.
Yesterday, Singaporean Lulu Lim Beng Kim, 63, pleaded guilty to 12 charges, including cheating and falsification of accounts.
Seeking a sentence of 19 and a half years, Deputy Public Prosecutor Nicholas Khoo said: “The losses caused in this case are unprecedented and staggering. Singapore’s reputation has been tarnished.”
While serving as the chief financial officer of Agritrade, Lim instructed her subordinates to submit unaudited and false financial statements to the financial institutions.
These documents were required by the financial institutions to assess how much credit they would extend to Agritrade.
The financial institutions would then disburse these sums to Agritrade’s suppliers for the purchase and sale of goods.
Agritrade or its suppliers were then expected to pay back the financial institutions at a later date.
In total, the 16 financial institutions disbursed more than US$886mil (RM3l.9bil) to the suppliers and their subsidiaries.
Investigations revealed that members of the commodity firm’s senior management had helped to incorporate these subsidiaries or sat on their board of directors.
In early 2020, Agritrade, whose business spans palm oil and coal mining, came under financial strain due to the collapse in oil and coal prices. It also faced allegations of fraud directed against Ng Xinwei, its chief executive, and his father Ng Say Pek, who founded the business.
On Jan 15, 2020, the Commercial Affairs Department started investigations against Agritrade. Lim left Singapore for the United Kingdom the next day and did not respond to multiple attempts by the police to contact her over the next year.
She was arrested in January 2021 after the police learned she was in the United Arab Emirates.
Yesterday, Noor Marican, who heads law firm Marican & Associates, pleaded for mercy on behalf of Lim, adding: “She takes full responsibility for her actions and makes no excuse for her conduct. She has pleaded guilty at the earliest possible time.” — The Straits Times/ANN
