Singapore oil trader sentenced to 17 years for ‘cheating’ HSBC over $112mn

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An octogenarian oil trader has been given a 17-and-a-half-year jail sentence in Singapore for defrauding HSBC, in a long-running case that sent shockwaves through the city-state’s commodity trading sector.

Lim Oon Kuin, known as OK Lim and once one of Singapore’s richest men, was sentenced on Monday after being convicted in May of “cheating” HSBC and abetting forgery. The 82-year-old founder of Hin Leong Trading was accused of encouraging a company executive to forge documents that tricked the bank into disbursing nearly $112mn.

Judge Toh Han Li of Singapore’s State Courts said the length of Lim’s sentence was designed to act as a “deterrent”. Prosecutors had sought a jail term of up to 20 years; Lim’s defence lawyer Davinder Singh argued for seven years, given his age and poor health. Lim attended court hearings in a wheelchair.

Bloomberg reported that Singh had appealed on behalf of his client and Lim would not begin his sentence until after the appeal hearing.

The case had centred on allegations that Hin Leong had been hiding losses from trading in futures markets and selling off oil inventories already pledged as collateral for loans.

Lim was originally charged in 2020 after confessing to hiding $800mn in losses from creditors — including HSBC and Singapore’s biggest lender DBS — and directing the company’s finance department not to disclose the losses.

He was initially hit with 130 criminal charges involving hundreds of millions of dollars, but was eventually tried on just three.

Singapore’s pivotal position on global shipping lanes connecting China with global markets, as well as its stability and low corporate tax rates, have made it one of the most important global hubs for commodities trading.

But a spate of scandals in the market throughout the 2010s raised questions about Singapore’s ability to rein in its trading houses. Several cases centred around fraud and forged documents. Paper trails make up the backbone of the industry.

With a single delivery truck, Lim founded Hin Leong in 1963 as an oil distributor. Over the decades, the family business grew to become Singapore’s largest independent oil trader and a major supplier of shipping fuel.

But the collapse in the oil market in 2020 sent his empire into a tailspin. Lim filed for bankruptcy last month and agreed to pay S$4.5bn (US$3.3bn) to liquidators and creditor HSBC to settle long-running civil lawsuits.