The Charges
TWO senior private bankers of Swiss bank BSI Bank Ltd in Singapore were slapped with a total of 14 charges on Oct 10, 2016, for allegedly being involved in illegal transactions of large amounts of money that originated from 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB).
They are Yak Yew Chee, 57, and Yvonne Seah Yew Foong, 45. Yak and Seah were identified as a managing director and director of BSI Singapore respectively.
Aside from charging the two, the Singapore authorities also took several other actions last week. After having shut down the operations of BSI Bank in April, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) also closed the operations of another Swiss private bank, Falcon Private Bank Ltd, and said that its Singapore branch manager Jens Sturzenegger had been arrested by the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD) on Oct 5.
MAS also fined Swiss bank UBS and Singapore’s DBS Bank S$1.3 million and S$1.0 million respectively for various breaches under the Prevention of Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism guidelines. Singapore’s central bank said the actions on the three banks followed supervisory examinations into 1MDB-related fund flows that took place through these banks from March 2013 to May 2015.
In Switzerland, its Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Finma) ordered Falcon to disgorge CHF2.5 million in illegal earnings and barred it from dealing with any “politically exposed persons” for three years. At the same time, the Office of the Swiss Attorney General announced that it was opening criminal investigations against Falcon.
Yak, Seah and their ex-colleague Yeo Jia Wei are among the four people who have been charged so far in Singapore with 1MDB-related offences. Yeo was charged in April for 11 offences including money laundering, cheating, forgery and obstruction of justice and has been in police remand since. Remisier Kelvin Ang was charged in April for corruption, for bribing an analyst to write a positive report on an asset that was to be acquired by 1MDB.
From the evidence produced in Singapore thus far, it appears that Yak and Seah were the principal relationship managers who handled the accounts of Low Taek Jho, or Jho Low, and his father Tan Sri Larry Low Hock Peng. It has been revealed that Yak also handled the BSI account of Brazen Sky Ltd — a subsidiary of 1MDB that supposedly received US$2.3 billion in payments from a Cayman Island fund that 1MDB had invested in. It turns out that this was a piece of misleading information provided by 1MDB and what was in the account were principally investment “units” and not cash.
Here are the detailed charges against Yak and Seah:
The seven charges against Yak
1. He forged a reference letter dated Feb 18, 2014, to Olivier Blanchet of BNP Paribas (Suisse) SA with the intent to make it look like it was signed with the authority of BSI Bank Ltd.
The letter was issued to confirm that the Low family were clients of good standing with assets in personal and trust accounts in Singapore and Switzerland. It went on to say that the Low family had a cumulative net worth of around US$1.63 billion.
2. He forged a similar letter on May 19, 2014, to Thomas Frey, a director of Kendris Ltd, a Zurich-based legal and tax advisory firm.
3. He forged a similar letter on Nov 20, 2012, to Stefan Liniger, the chief executive of Rothschild Trust (Schweiz) AG in Switzerland, to confirm that Larry Low had transferred US$150 million from his BSI account to Jho Low’s account, of which US$110 million was wired to Selune Ltd. (The US Department of Justice has alleged that Selune Ltd’s beneficial owner is Jho Low and his family and the money was subsequently linked to the purchase of an apartment at the Time Warner Tower in New York by Jho Low.)
4. He failed to report the suspicious transfer of US$153 million on Nov 2, 2012, from Good Star Ltd (bank account 11116073 with Coutts & Co AG, Zurich) to Abu Dhabi-Kuwait-Malaysia Investment Corporation (ADKMIC) (bank account 6C02901 with BSI Bank Ltd, Singapore). The charge sheet said Yak “had reasonable grounds to suspect” that the transfer “in whole directly represented the proceeds of an act which may constitute criminal conduct”.
(Jho Low is the beneficiary owner of ADKMIC and Good Star. In September 2009, 1MDB transferred US$700 million to Good Star as part of a supposed investment in a joint venture with Petro Saudi International Ltd. This transfer by the management of 1MDB was done without the knowledge and consent of the 1MDB board of directors, according to Malaysia’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report. 1MDB also transferred an additional US$330 million to Good Star in 2011. Good Star received in total US$1.03 billion from 1MDB in the space of two years.
5. He failed to make a suspicious transaction report when US$153 million was transferred from the ADKMIC account to Larry Low’s account (6C02423) in the same bank on Nov 5, 2012.
6. He failed to make a suspicious transaction report when US$150 million was transferred on Nov 7, 2012, from Larry Low’s account to the account (6C02328) of Low Taek Jho.
7. He failed to make a suspicious transaction report on the transfer of US$110 million from Jho Low’s account to the account of Selune Ltd with Rothschild Trust in Switzerland on Nov 7, 2012.
The seven charges against Seah
She was charged for aiding Yak in Charges 1 and 2 and also faces Charges 3 to 6. The seventh charge against her is for aiding Yeo Jia Wei on Dec 23, 2013, in forging a reference letter to Simon Kingsbury, the managing director for compliance for Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) of Citigroup Inc. The letter certified that British Virgin Island-registered SRC International (Malaysia) Ltd was beneficially owned by the Government of Malaysia and had an account at BSI Singapore that has been “conducted in a satisfactory manner”.
No pleas were taken from Yak and Seah, who were released on S$35,000 bail each.
Yak made the news earlier this year when he went to court to get an order to unfreeze S$27 million of cash in bank accounts, which were salaries and bonuses paid to him by BSI. The Singapore authorities had frozen the accounts as part of their investigations into BSI and 1MDB’s financial transactions. He later withdrew the suit.
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