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 ©The
Straits Times, Singapore (Used by permission)
by Sujin Thomas
He is fourth person convicted; the fifth man, lawyer David
Rasif, is still at large
A LAWYER who was part of a group which swindled banks and the Central Provident
Fund (CPF) Board by declaring inflated purchase prices of properties was
sentenced to five years' jail yesterday.
David Tan Hock Boon, 40, became the fourth person convicted in connection with
the scam, which also involved property agent Goh Chong Liang and fugitive lawyer
David Rasif.
Rasif went missing in June 2006 with about $12 million of his clients' money and
remains on the run.
Pleading for leniency, Tan's lawyer Sanjiv Rajan took pains to explain to the
court that Goh was the 'prime mover', and that Tan was not a 'conniving
criminal'.
He said his client 'very foolishly followed Mr Rasif's instruction and engaged
in the conspiracy'.
Goh was jailed for five years and five months in August last year.
Before Tan was sentenced, Deputy Public Prosecutor Ong Luan Tze urged the judge
to take into consideration that Tan committed the offences while he was a
practising lawyer.
She implied that as a lawyer acting on behalf of clients, he should have been
held to some professional standards.
Tan, a father of two young children, stopped practising law in April 2006 on
leaving Rasif's law firm and became a freelance business development manager.
He was arrested in August 2006 and has been in remand for the last three months
because he was unable to raise the $120,000 bail offered.
Court documents said that the scam involved Goh convincing sellers and buyers of
mainly Housing Board properties to declare inflated purchase prices.
They secured mortgages well above the value of the flats with phoney CPF
documents and employment records.
The scam, which started in 2004, put nearly $700,000 in the pockets of the
conspirators in just over a year.
Court documents did not say how the men planned to get away without repaying the
loans, although Mr Rajan said Tan received no money from the transactions.
When the Commercial Affairs Department got wind of what they were doing in 2005,
Goh asked to have the signatures removed from documents connected to the sale of
the flats.
Tan handed over the documents to Goh, who erased his own signatures and replaced
them with those of another man, Zurkifli Alang Noordin, who did it in return for
money.
Zurkifli was jailed for a year in April.
Another man in the scam, Abu Samah Yacob, was jailed for 17 months in June.
When the hearing was over, Tan was the picture of a broken man - dazed and lost
in thought.
His friends offered sympathetic pats on his back as he was led away.
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