SINGAPORE: Over seven years, a bank relationship manager at Credit Suisse forged 112 bank instruction letters to carry out unauthorised transactions on clients’ accounts. Credit Suisse paid S$14.3 million (US$11.1 million) in compensation after the offences were uncovered.
Soh Yuan-Yi, a 50-year-old Singaporean, was sentenced on Thursday (Jan 8) to 13 years’ jail, marking the culmination of a long-drawn court process that began in 2018.
Soh pleaded guilty to 30 charges which included forgery and transferring benefits from criminal conduct, with another 123 charges taken into consideration.
THE CASE
The court heard that Soh was recruited for the post of assistant vice-president with the Singapore branch of Credit Suisse AG and began working there in December 2005.
She was promoted to vice-president due to good work performance in 2011 and worked there until August 2013.
As part of her job, she recommended investment products to clients, carried out their instructions for their accounts and established new clients.
Soh also had access to account information and balances of her clients, as well as their bank statements.
Through Soh, each client invested at least S$2 million to S$20 million through Credit Suisse.
Between 2006 and 2013, Credit Suisse performed transactions on its clients’ bank accounts by following instructions written on instruction letters that had to be signed by the clients. The letters could be submitted by relationship managers or their assistants.
Soh abused this process. Between 2006 and 2013, she used at least 112 forged instruction letters to perform unauthorised transactions on 22 Credit Suisse accounts belonging to 15 clients assigned to her.
Soh did this by forging client signatures and at times writing false reasons for the transactions so the back office would process them.
The illegal transactions included inter-client transfers, transfers to other bank accounts under her own control, payments for her own personal transactions and payments to other accounts for the expenses of other Credit Suisse clients.
The inter-client transfers were generally made because Soh did not want her clients to know about the losses or unauthorised withdrawals.
She did not want her clients to realise that they had suffered trading losses from authorised trades, or the unauthorised trades she had conducted to recoup losses from the authorised trades.
