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SINGAPORE: Over seven years, a bank relationship manager at Credit Suisse forged 112 bank instruction letters to carry out unauthorised transactions on clients’ accounts. Credit Suisse paid S$14.3 million (US$11.1 million) in compensation after the offences were uncovered.
Soh Yuan-Yi, a 50-year-old Singaporean, was sentenced on Thursday (Jan 8) to 13 years' jail, marking the culmination of a long-drawn court process that began in 2018.
Soh pleaded guilty to 30 charges which included forgery and transferring benefits from criminal conduct, with another 123 charges taken into consideration.
THE CASE
The court heard that Soh was recruited for the post of assistant vice-president with the Singapore branch of Credit Suisse AG and began working there in December 2005.
She was promoted to vice-president due to good work performance in 2011 and worked there until August 2013.
As part of her job, she recommended investment products to clients, carried out their instructions for their accounts and established new clients.
Soh also had access to account information and balances of her clients, as well as their bank statements.
Through Soh, each client invested at least S$2 million to S$20 million through Credit Suisse.
Between 2006 and 2013, Credit Suisse performed transactions on its clients' bank accounts by following instructions written on instruction letters that had to be signed by the clients. The letters could be submitted by relationship managers or their assistants.
Soh abused this process. Between 2006 and 2013, she used at least 112 forged instruction letters to perform unauthorised transactions on 22 Credit Suisse accounts belonging to 15 clients assigned to her.
Soh did this by forging client signatures and at times writing false reasons for the transactions so the back office would process them.
The illegal transactions included inter-client transfers, transfers to other bank accounts under her own control, payments for her own personal transactions and payments to other accounts for the expenses of other Credit Suisse clients.
The inter-client transfers were generally made because Soh did not want her clients to know about the losses or unauthorised withdrawals.
She did not want her clients to realise that they had suffered trading losses from authorised trades, or the unauthorised trades she had conducted to recoup losses from the authorised trades.
Soh also thought her career prospects would be adversely affected if her clients became upset with her.
She also made unauthorised withdrawals from her clients' accounts to bank accounts she held jointly with her mother or her husband.
Soh also used money from some clients to pay for the expenses of other clients without any of them knowing.
In 2007, Soh and her husband bought a private landed cluster house at 45 Yio Chu Kang Drive for S$1,369,900.
To pay the down payment, she used two forged instruction letters purportedly authorised by one of her clients to issue two cheques worth S$110,000 in total to an account she held jointly with her husband.
She then used S$104,692 from this amount to pay towards the purchase of the property.
Two years later, the couple wanted to sell the property to use the sale proceeds to buy another piece of real estate.
Soh was unable to find a buyer and wanted to sell it as soon as possible in order to use the sale proceeds to buy another property.
She transferred ownership to a Credit Suisse client without his knowledge, forging his signature and the signature of purported witnesses on a purchase agreement.
In the forged agreement, the client bought the property from the couple for S$1,490,000.
After the property was transferred, Soh lied to the client that it was a "free gift" to him.
Soh then forged instruction letters so that about S$1.5 million from the client's account was transferred to her or to the account of the law firm that handled the transaction.
This client eventually sold the property and incurred a net loss of S$86,841.81.
CLIENT COMPLAINT
In June 2013, one of the victims complained to Credit Suisse about multiple unauthorised transactions conducted using his account.
Credit Suisse investigated internally and suspended Soh's duties that same month before lodging a police report.
Soh was fired in August 2013.
As a result of her offences, the total amount that was paid out of the accounts of Credit Suisse clients was S$9.2 million.
Credit Suisse paid a total of S$14.3 million to compensate its clients for what it assessed to be losses arising from Soh's offences and trades it considered to be conducted by Soh without authorisation.
Soh made repayment of S$3.3 million to Credit Suisse and its clients.
Her sister-in-law also surrendered a sum of over S$311,000, which Soh had deposited in her account in 2013.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Norman Yew said the total net unauthorised payment out of Credit Suisse clients' accounts was S$5.9 million, while Soh had a total net benefit of S$2.84 million.
He sought 15 years and two months' jail to 16 years' jail for Soh.
Soh's lawyers from RCLT Law asked for not more than seven-and-a-half years' jail, disputing several sums used by the prosecutor.
For instance, they argued that her benefit as a result of the offences was S$1,397,474.73 instead.
Mr Navin Thevar said that while Ms Soh did not commit the offences for "purely altruistic reasons", the value of the unauthorised transactions she carried out to benefit herself represented only about 20 per cent of the total amount across all the forgery clients.
He said his client had suffered "immense mental anguish, anxiety and distress" in the 13 years it took for the case to conclude from the first interview by the police.
The prosecution, on the other hand, said time was needed to investigate and review the case because of the high number of transactions and complex fund flows. He claimed that much of the delay was due to Soh's disputes with the statement of facts.
