Indian-Origin Shipping Company Director In Singapore Sentenced To Jail For Fraud

A Indian-origin former director of a shipbuilding company was sentenced to five years in jail in Singapore for cheating a financing firm of over SGD 1.3 million in 2016, a media report said.

Vignish Vijelal, 36, was sentenced to jail on Monday for cheating Capital March Platform (CMP), an invoice financing platform, multiple times in 2016 through factoring agreements, using ten fake invoices, according to the Straits Times newspaper.

At the time of the offences, Vijelal and his father were directors at Lal Marine and Construction (LMC).

Each of the ten invoices was accompanied by a work order, purportedly between LMC and offshore structure builder Keppel FELS, despite there being no contract between the two companies regarding the works stated on the orders.

Instead, there was a corresponding genuine work order between LMC's sister company- Lal Offshore Marine (LOM) - and Keppel FELS.

District Judge Marvin Bay had earlier convicted Vijelal of 10 cheating charges after a trial.

Before handing down the sentence on Monday, the judge noted that Vijelal said in his mitigation plea that he had made repayments totalling more than SGD 400,000, putting the net loss by CMP to be over SGD 950,000.

"In sentencing for financial and commercial crimes, the quantum of loss is often considered to be a proxy to peg the harm caused by the criminal activity," the report quoted the judge as saying.

Factoring is a process in which a company obtains a loan by assigning a debt owed to the company itself, Deputy Public Prosecutor Suhas Malhotra said.

Viejlal intends to appeal, and his bail has been set at SGD110,000, according to the report.

For each count of cheating, an offender can be jailed for up to 10 years and fined.

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