Indian shipping company director in Singapore sentenced to prison for fraud

Singapore:

A former director of an Indian-born shipbuilding company was sentenced to five years in prison in Singapore for defrauding a finance company of more than SGD 1.3 million in 2016, according to a media report.

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

At the time of the crimes, 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 construction builder Keppel FELS, despite there being no contract between the two companies for the works listed on the orders.

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

District Judge Marvin Bay had previously convicted Vijelal of 10 post-trial fraud charges.

Before handing down the sentence on Monday, the judge noted that Vijelal said in his plea that he had repaid more than SGD 400,000 in total, which would put CMP’s net loss at more than SGD 950,000.

“In the sentencing of financial and commercial crimes, the magnitude of the loss is often taken as a measure of the harm caused by the criminal activity,” the report quoted the judge as saying.

Factoring is a process by which a company obtains a loan by transferring a debt to the company itself, according to Deputy Public Prosecutor Suha Malhotra.

Viejlal plans to appeal and his bail has been set at SGD 110,000, according to the report.

For each count of cheating, an offender faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine.

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