WORKING WITH SU BAOLIN
Around December 2020, Wang started working with Su Baolin to open a bank account with Citibank and officially became his relationship manager from January the following year.
On Dec 8, 2020, at Su Baolin’s request, Wang helped him arrange the sale of 1,499,980 units of cryptocurrency USDT in exchange for Singapore dollars through a third-party sales agent.
This was part of a “private arrangement” between the two and not done through Citibank’s platforms, the court heard.
Su Baolin instructed Wang that the sale proceeds were to be delivered into the former’s Standard Chartered Bank account. He emphasised that the deposit must be made by a remittance company and not from a personal bank account, and that the sale would be made in a few tranches over several days so that each deposited sum “would not be as great”.
This came after Su Baolin expressed concern that the sales agent may abscond with the money if the entire amount of USDT was sold in one transaction.
Wang agreed to his requests, and told Su Baolin that the sales agent had suggested splitting up the transaction into tranches so they would be less likely to attract queries from Standard Chartered Bank.
Wang instructed the sales agent, whom he had engaged, according to Su Baolin’s instructions. But after the first tranche of the transaction, where 499,999 USDT was sold for S$657,980, the money was deposited into Su Baolin’s bank account by a personal bank account belonging to a “Se Liang”.
Both Wang and Su Baolin did not know who Se Liang was, and the latter was angry when he discovered that the deposit was using a personal bank account instead of a corporate bank account, the court heard.
Su Baolin demanded that Wang “do up” a loan agreement to account for the deposit, and said that without this agreement, there would be no other way to explain the deposit to his bank.
