Judge Jail Former Agent Of Tokio Marine

A district court judge has ordered a woman to serve four weeks of jail time, after she repeatedly refused to comply with two court orders to take down offensive social media posts that she had made against Tokio Marine Life Insurance Singapore.

Tay Tiang Choo, who was herself a former insurance agent, reposted her false statements on her Facebook account after the first order.

Tay accused Tokio Marine of committing “scam and fraud” in 2018. She thought the company had discontinued her retirement policy when an internal warning to her agent was mistakenly triggered. She then sent a letter to the firm’s headquarters in Japan demanding compensation and forwarded it to multiple parties, including the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

Soon after, she agreed to a settlement with Tokio Marine when it agreed to apologize for its service lapse and offered S$890 of shopping vouchers. However, in June 2019, Tay learnt that a second life policy that she bought with Tokio Marine had lapsed. She claimed that her bank account had enough money in March and April that year when attempts were made to deduct the policy premiums, and that she was not notified of the lapse. Tokio Marine arranged a meeting to explain the reason and offered to reinstate her policy upon payment of the unpaid premiums.

From late 2019 to August last year, Tay sent complaint letters and email messages to several high-profile parties again, demanded S$1 million in compensation from Tokio Marine, and threatened to go to the press and publicize the matter on social media.

She then uploaded various posts and a video on her Facebook and TikTok accounts, alleging that the firm had cheated and defrauded her. The TikTok video showed her protesting in front of Tokio Marine’s office with a board listing the allegations.

In October last year, Tokio Marine filed a court summons to stop Tay from publishing the allegations until a court decided if they were false. The company also sought an order for her to post a notification on her social media accounts that she had made false statements and to forward them to the parties she contacted.

Tay’s allegations included Tokio Marine being “unprofessional and disrespectful” to her, actively lying to and misleading its customers about its policies, and “bleeding out” Tay’s policy until she could no longer pay premiums.

The court granted an interim order the next month, but she did not comply. Instead, she reposted the allegations on her Facebook page three times and encouraged others to like and share the posts.

Under the orders, Tay had to immediately remove her posts, stop publishing such allegations and publish a correction notice on her social media accounts by March 3 this year. It was only after these orders were served on her in late February that she considered complying with them, District Judge Kaur noted in her judgement.

Tay took the Facebook posts down in March. Tokio Marine was then granted leave to begin committal proceedings — that is, to penalise her for non-compliance with a court order. By June, Tay had completely removed the posts from her accounts but refused to publish the correction notice, telling District Judge Kaur: “Like what I have said many times, Ma’am, even if you kill me, I will not do this correction order or correction notice.”

As of the date of the judgement, Tay had not served her jail sentence because of Covid-19 public health concerns.