[SINGAPORE] The appeal made by the conspirators behind Singapore’s 2013 penny stock crash against their conviction has been dismissed by the Court of Appeal.
The court on Friday (Oct 10) found that Soh Chee Wen – also known as John Soh – and Quah Su-Ling had failed to demonstrate any error in the trial judge’s findings of fact.
In December 2022, after a trial that lasted nearly 200 days, the two were convicted of 178 charges that included false trading, price manipulation, deception and cheating (collectively, the conspiracy charges). Soh received an additional eight charges for witness tampering.
All the charges against them were upheld by the Court of Appeal.
Delivering the judgment, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon said that it is “ill-advised” to mount an appeal to “contend for a different set of factual conclusions premised on the appellate court reconsidering essentially the same contentions that had already been advanced and rejected at first instance”.
He reiterated that when factual findings are challenged on appeal, “it is incumbent on the appellant to identify precisely where the trial judge is said to have erred and to demonstrate that the high threshold for appellate intervention has indeed been crossed”.
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The court was also presided over by Justice Tay Yong Kwang and Senior Judge Andrew Phang.
In the 2022 ruling, Malaysian businessman Soh was sentenced to 36 years’ jail. Quah, the former chief executive of Singapore-listed IPCO International and Soh’s ex-partner, was handed a jail sentence of 20 years.
Between August 2012 and October 2013, the two used multiple trading accounts to rig the share prices of three penny stocks: Blumont Group, Asiasons Capital and LionGold Corp. They did this by creating a false impression of demand and supply for these shares.
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They also deceived Goldman Sachs International and Interactive Brokers into issuing around S$820 million in margin financing to fuel the scheme.
On Oct 4, 2013, the three counters crashed, wiping S$8 billion of market capitalisation from the Singapore Exchange (SGX).
Arguments dismissed
Soh and Quah began their appeal in March this year. Soh was represented by Senior Counsel Sreenivasan Narayanan, while Quah was represented by Sivananthan Nithyanantham.
The appeal characterised the conspiracy charges as inadequately detailed for failing to specify when or where Soh and Quah had entered into each conspiracy.
However, the court countered that the premise for criminal liability in this context is on a person being party to a criminal conspiracy, and not the specific act of entering into that conspiracy. This is based on Section 120B of the Penal Code.
Soh and Quah also contended that the charges did not specify relevant details for each conspiracy, such as the duration the trading accounts were used, and which trading representatives they worked with.
Rejecting this, the court noted that the appellants had unsuccessfully mounted a similar argument at their trial.
It said: “The omission of the disputed particulars, such as the precise manner in which the appellants had exercised control over the account pursuant to the conspiracy… could not have prevented the appellants from understanding the substance of the allegations levelled against them.”
The court upheld that Soh and Quah were party to a conspiracy to deceive various financial institutions through the purchase and sale of shares in Blumont Group, Asiasons Capital and LionGold Corp.
The duo contended that there was no deception, as the trading representatives of these financial institutions were aware of their involvement.
However, the court said that the institutions themselves were victims of their representatives’ “dishonesty and their flagrant breaches of the SGX-ST Rules”.
As for deceiving Goldman Sachs International and Interactive Brokers, Soh and Quah argued that guilt lay only in the omission of certain facts, rather than cheating.
But the court disagreed, saying that the securities of the three counters were held as legitimate collateral for margin financing despite the fact that they were the subject of manipulative trading practices.
