Public Prosecutor v Ewe Pang Kooi
Jurisdiction | Singapore |
Judge | Chan Seng Onn J |
Judgment Date | 16 July 2019 |
Neutral Citation | [2019] SGHC 166 |
Court | High Court (Singapore) |
Docket Number | Criminal Case No 53 of 2018 |
Year | 2019 |
Published date | 28 March 2020 |
Hearing Date | 28 May 2019 |
Plaintiff Counsel | Hon Yi and Nicholas Khoo (Attorney-General's Chambers) |
Defendant Counsel | Michael Khoo SC and Low Miew Yin Josephine (Michael Khoo & Partners) |
Subject Matter | Criminal Law,Offences,Criminal breach of trust by agent,Sentencing |
Citation | [2019] SGHC 166 |
Driven by an insatiable appetite for gambling, Ewe Pang Kooi (“the accused”) pilfered about $41 million from his unwitting victims who had entrusted him to manage their affairs and finances over the course of about ten years.1 Till date, after accounting for sums which the accused had deposited back into the victim companies, about $24 million remain unrecovered.2 It is fair to say that one man’s gambling habit came at a great price for many.
In
The prescribed sentence under s 409 PC is life imprisonment or an imprisonment term of up to 20 years. The imprisonment term was raised from ten years to 20 years in the 2008 Penal Code amendments (see Penal Code (Amendment) Act 2007 (No. 51 of 2007), First Schedule at (34)). Such grave penalties reflect the severity of the offences which the accused has been charged with and convicted of.
Methodology in sentencing In determining the appropriate sentence for the accused, I note that the court in
While the end result may not differ significantly, as Chao Hick Tin JA (as he then was) observed in
I therefore adopt the approach in
To arrive at the sentence for each of the accused’s 50 offences, I have considered the relevant sentencing precedents for criminal breach of trust (“CBT”), as well as the aggravating and mitigating factors in this case.
The preliminary sentence In
In an offence like criminal breach of trust, it is a matter of common sense that, all other things being equal, the larger the amount dishonestly misappropriated the greater the culpability of the offender and the more severe the sentence of the court.
Hence, in CBT offences, the key indicator of the harm perpetrated as well as the culpability of the offender is the amount misappropriated. After this is determined, a preliminary sentence may be derived. Following which, discounts or uplifts to the preliminary sentence may be allowed in the particular case depending on the aggravating and mitigating factors of each case.
Dataset of s 409 PC cases With the above in mind, I proceed to review the following s 409 PC cases (
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Plotting the cases involving amounts of up to $150,000 on a graph, it can be seen that certain cases buck the trend and may be regarded as outliers, to which no weight ought to be given in determining the appropriate preliminary sentence (see
When all the cases are plotted on a graph (
The new outlier, marked as a yellow rectangular point, represents the 36 months’ imprisonment term which the accused in
Disregarding the five highlighted outliers, the following best fit curves for the s 409 PC cases are revealed (see
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...Manpower Act: Chiew Kok Chai v Public Prosecutor [2019] SGHC 169. Section 409 of the Penal Code: Public Prosecutor v Ewe Pang Kooi [2019] SGHC 166. Section 331(3A) read with s 240(1) of the Securities and Futures Act: Public Prosecutor v Tan Seo Whatt Albert and another appeal [2019] SGHC 1......
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