The appeal hearing of convicted market manipulators Soh Chee Wen and Quah Su-ling got off to a bumpy start for the defence, with the apex court rejecting several arguments put forward to quash the pair’s convictions for their roles in Singapore’s largest securities fraud.
Soh, an undischarged bankrupt, and Quah, his co-conspirator and girlfriend, were found guilty of manipulating the shares of Blumont Group, Asiasons Capital and Liongold Corp — collectively known as BAL — between August 2012 and October 2013.
Soh was convicted of 180 charges and sentenced by High Court Judge Hoo Sheau Peng on Dec 28, 2022, to 36 years in jail. Quah was found guilty of 169 charges and given 20 years behind bars. The charges involved false trading, price manipulation, deception, cheating and — in the case of Soh — witness tampering.
They were granted a stay on execution of their sentences pending their appeal, which is heard by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, Justice Andrew Phang and Justice Tay Yong Kwang.
The appeal hearing kicked off on March 3 before a packed courtroom. Instead of two consecutive days as initially scheduled, it will now be heard over several tranches. The next tranche is slated to take two to three days in the next few weeks, with dates yet to be fixed.
As part of his opening arguments on Day 1 of the hearing, which dealt with five broad areas of objections by the defence, Quah’s lawyer alleged that Judge Hoo was biased against his client and even demonstrated “excessive interference” in the trial.
See also: John Soh, Quah Su-ling back in court to fight convictions
In particular, the trial judge had inferred guilt on Quah after finding Soh guilty of witness tampering, according to N Sivananthan, a criminal lawyer with his own law firm in Malaysia and who practises in Singapore under David Nayar and Associates.
“There was a joint trial on the charges in respect of both appellants and also the witness tampering charges. The witness tampering charges were only against the first appellant (Soh). It was never against the second appellant,” Sivananthan said.
“By making a finding that she must have been involved in the conspiracy because of the actions of the first appellant, that would obviously affect the way (the trial judge) evaluates any evidence in respect of the second appellant.”
Quah, on her way to court on March 3. Photo: Albert Chua/The Edge Singapore
Chief Justice: ‘Absurd’
Sivananthan withdrew his allegations against the trial judge after CJ Menon took issue with his arguments. “You seem to suggest that a judge hearing a case over nearly 200 days has got to keep an empty mind through the course of the entire proceedings. That, with respect, is absurd,” Menon said.
“When you have a case like this where there’s a complex interplay of facts, you’re bound to consider how they all fit together. That’s nothing to do with bias. You might stand there and say that the judge was not entitled to draw that inference as a legal point, but I find it somewhat unsatisfactory that you stand there and proclaim this is evidence of bias.”
Counsels for the defence also took issue with what they deemed were duplicitous charges for certain offences and pointed to a lack of details in other charges, especially the 10 related to false trading and market manipulation.
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“How can you have a conspiracy charge without a sufficient particularisation of the criminal offence intended?” Senior Counsel N Sreenivasan, Soh’s lawyer, asked in court.
“(The prosecution) agglomerated 179 trading accounts. It doesn’t tell us which accounts were being dealt with in charge number one, charge number two, all the way to charge number 10,” Sreenivasan said.
“It doesn't tell us which trading representative was being used to control those accounts for any one of these transactions. It doesn't even tell us which broking house was used for each of the 10 charges. If the particularisation was not given, then there is no way any defence could have been run in a meaningful way.”
Justice Phang called Sreenivasan’s argument “circular”, noting the sheer magnitude of the 197-day BAL trial.
“You’re not talking about a plain vanilla, simple offence or conspiracy. You’re talking about a situation here that took 197 hearing days. That is the magnitude and complexity of the situation that faced everybody, including the judge and the prosecution,” Phang said.
Sreenivasan revisited this argument later in the hearing, pointing out a statement by the prosecution that “all orders in all accounts were controlled by the accused persons”. “If we show significant orders in some accounts — significant in terms of volume and value — then this statement will not be a true statement," Sreenivasan said.
“And if this statement is not a true statement, the next question we need to ask is ‘Which orders in which accounts have been controlled by the accused?’ To answer that question without particularisation is impossible.”
The defence also argued that the proper provisions for punishment were not applied by the trial judge in sentencing. “There should not have been this back and forth, and perhaps a little bit of insistence by the learned judge, to say that if you can't get him on A, you can get him on B,” said Sivananthan.
Next tranche
The next tranche of the appeal hearing is expected to focus on the merits of the trial judge's decision to convict Soh and Quah of their combined 349 charges.
Soh’s lawyer will argue that the convictions overlooked the actions of certain individuals who had worked on their own or closely with each other to trade the BAL shares without the full knowledge of both appellants.
These individuals include Dick Gwee, Ken Tai, Gabriel Gan, Henry Tjoa and Leroy Lau, all of whom testified during the trial. Gwee, in particular, was found to have made about $50 million in profits together with his family members from trading BAL shares. His counterparties in these trades included Tai, Gan and Tjoa.
All four were found to have worked in concert to trade the three stocks under what was dubbed the Manhattan House Group. This was a reference to their trading operations carried out from an office unit they had rented along Chin Swee Road.
According to written submissions filed with the Court of Appeal by Soh’s lawyers, Lau, Tjoa and Tai were responsible for almost 90% of the trading activities involving BAL. Even so, Tai and Tjoa were regarded by the trial judge to be “witnesses of truth”, Soh’s lawyers pointed out in their submissions.
On their part, the prosecution team, comprising seven members from the Attorney-General’s Chambers, urged the court in their written submissions to dismiss the appeals by Soh and Quah. "There are no grounds to overturn any of the Judge’s findings or to disturb the decision on conviction.”
