Fugitive lawyer’s life on the run

By Kai Fong | Singapore Scene
Tue, Apr 19, 2011

A lawyer, who had been on the run for six years until his arrest in 2009, was jailed in Singapore for nine years on Monday for criminal breach of trust and cheating involving a total of S $4.8 million.

A former star debater at the National University of Singapore (NUS) law faculty, Tan Cheng Yew, 43, was convicted of misappropriating S$1.5 million and S$1.9 million from five members of a Tan family — to whom he is not related — in 2001, The Straits Times reported.

He was also found guilty of two charges of deceiving Tommy Tan Kwee Khoon, a member of the same family, of S$480,000 and S$900,000 in 2002.

The Malaysian and Singapore permanent resident was practising as a partner of Tan Cheng Yew & Partners and Tan Jin Hwee, Eunice & Lim Choo Eng.

During the 16-day trial, Tan repeatedly said that he had acted as a trustee to the Tan family's money in his personal capacity and not his professional role as a lawyer.

District Judge Hamidah Ibrahim did not accept the defence's arguments.

In February 2003, Tan, then 34, fled to Perth, Western Australia, where he stayed in his family's house and hotels. He did not contact his family regularly initially as they "didn't take what I had done… too well", he said in court earlier this year.

Tan testified that he had adopted an "ostrich-like mentality". When he called his parents for the first time, they said that "what's past is past", and they should not dwell on it. Tan felt that it had been his parents' way of consoling him, as there were times when he had been distraught.

Later in 2003, he travelled to the United States on a forged passport under an assumed name. He worked as legal counsel in multinational companies and flew regularly to Munich and Germany for work. While in the U.S., he contacted his parents weekly.

One of the reasons Tan gave for staying away for so long was that he was trying to earn enough money to repay the Tan family.

Tan told the court he had picked up gambling from a client in the late 1990s and began gambling heavily at casinos in Australia and on cruise ships in 1998, where he chalked up debts. He said he also owed relatives and friends about S$700,000.

Tan was arrested at Munich airport on June 2, 2009 and held in remand until his extradition in October that year.

He comes from a family of lawyers and his older brother is Professor Tan Cheng Han, dean of the law faculty at NUS and a senior counsel. His father, Tan Hock Him, 85, who was in court yesterday, is a retired lawyer.