High Court sets aside duo’s acquittal of bribing then LTA official, cites copying by district judge

SINGAPORE – The High Court has set aside a decision by a district judge to acquit two men of bribing a then Land Transport Authority (LTA) official following an appeal by the prosecution.

This was because district judge Soh Tze Bian, who has since retired, had extensively copied from the defence’s submissions and presented them as his own findings, and failed to consider significant aspects of the prosecution’s evidence.

Before his retirement in 2025, Mr Soh had faced similar complaints on two other occasions.

In a written judgment on March 23, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon said Mr Soh had arrived at his decision in 2024 to acquit Pay Teow Heng, 58, and Pek Lian Guan, 61, in breach of natural justice.

The Chief Justice said: “In my judgment, a fair-minded and informed observer would harbour a reasonable suspicion or apprehension that the (district judge) failed to judiciously consider the material before him.”

He said judicial copying is unacceptable because it gives rise to the risk of the losing party feeling that it has not had a fair hearing.

Allegations of such copying can also cause a potential loss of confidence in the integrity of the judicial process, he added.

Chief Justice Menon said that instead of ordering a retrial as a remedy, he will consider afresh the evidence that had been presented during the trial.

He added that it was common ground between the prosecution and defence that if he were to come to the view that Mr Soh’s decision is tainted by a breach of natural justice, he should deal with the matter based on the records because no complaint has been raised with the way the evidence was taken.

The Chief Justice noted that the trial spanned over 40 days and stretched across a duration of more than two years.

A retrial would subject the parties to “a considerable amount of additional expenses and delay through no fault of their own, without any corresponding benefit”, he said.

Pay, who was then a director at construction firm Tiong Seng Contractors, was accused of giving bribes in the form of loans totalling $350,000 to then LTA deputy group director Henry Foo Yung Thye in 2017 and 2018.

Pek, who was then the managing director of the firm, was accused of intentionally aiding Pay in giving the bribes to Foo.

LTA had engaged the firm to construct an MRT station under a contract initially valued at $315 million.

Foo, the LTA employee responsible for supervising the execution of the project, had called Pay to borrow money.

Pay did not immediately agree, but took Foo’s requests to Pek, who facilitated the approval of two staff loans from the firm to Foo via Pay.

In his defence, Pay said he gave the loan to help Foo as they were friends who met socially and that he had no corrupt intent in lending money to Foo.

Similarly, Pek said he did not lend money to Foo with the intention of benefiting the company.

In September 2021, Foo, then 47, was sentenced to 5½ years’ jail for taking about $1.24 million in bribes in the form of loans from several contractors and subcontractors.

In October 2024, Pay and Pek were cleared of their charges by Mr Soh, who found that the incriminating statements the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau had recorded from them were “inaccurate and unreliable”.

The prosecution’s appeal against their acquittals was heard on July 22, 2025.

The prosecution argued that Mr Soh had adopted the defence’s written submissions as his own findings and failed to properly evaluate the evidence. This gave rise to a reasonable suspicion that he had failed to discharge his judicial duty.

Mr Soh, who was appointed a district judge on Aug 1, 2008, retired from the Singapore Judicial Service on Jan 17, 2025.

The quality of his work had been criticised twice by two Supreme Court judges in recent years.

In September 2023, Chief Justice Menon said Mr Soh’s conduct in reproducing large chunks of the prosecution’s written submissions in his grounds of decision with minimal changes was “wholly unsatisfactory as a matter of judicial practice”.

In December 2024, Mr Soh’s use of substantial portions of the prosecution’s submissions without his own analysis was flagged by Justice Aidan Xu as a serious concern.

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