SINGAPORE – The Court of Appeal upheld a lower court’s sentences on March 18 and dismissed appeals by John Soh Chee Wen and Quah Su-Ling, co-conspirators behind Singapore’s 2013 penny stock crash, to reduce their jail terms of 36 years and 20 years respectively.
The court found that the sentences handed down by High Court Judge Hoo Sheau Peng were reasonable, in line with precedents from previous cases and not manifestly excessive.
In meting out the longest custodial sentence for market manipulation in Singapore’s history, the High Court took into account scale and sophistication, as well as the severity of the harm caused by a scheme that wiped out almost $8 billion in stock market value in October 2013.
In December 2022, after a trial that lasted nearly 200 days over four years, Soh, 66, and Quah, 62, were convicted of a record 349 successful charges in total, including false trading, price manipulation, deception and cheating. Soh also received eight charges over witness tampering.
The duo lost their appeal in October 2025 to overturn their convictions over manipulating shares of Blumont Group, Asiasons Capital and LionGold – collectively referred to as BAL – between August 2012 and October 2013. They orchestrated trades through 187 accounts across 20 financial institutions, many of which were misled into extending financing for the scheme.
Delivering the judgment on March 18, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon rejected Soh’s arguments that the October 2013 crash was caused by factors beyond his control, and that he should not be held responsible for the alleged wrongdoing of a group of individuals who had acted beyond Soh and Quah’s control.
These individuals – known as the Manhattan House Group – included Mr Dick Gwee, Mr Ken Tai, Mr Henry Tjoa and Mr Gabriel Gan, who actively traded the three stocks from a rented office in Manhattan House in Chin Swee Road.
Instead, the Court of Appeal upheld the lower court’s findings that “Soh was certainly aware of the trading activities of the Manhattan House Group, and saw this as a necessary consequence of the need to keep the scheme going”.
Soh “had grander aspirations, in that he hoped, over the longer term, to inflate the liquidity and value of BAL shares to a point where the profits could be used to finance other corporate deals he envisaged”.
