Penny Stock John Soh Chee Wen

The mastermind of a scheme that led to the largest and most serious case of market manipulation in Singapore, which wiped out S$8 billion from the Singapore stock market in 2013, was sentenced on Wednesday (Dec 28).

John Soh Chee Wen, a prominent Malaysian businessman, was handed 36 years' jail. His ex-partner and accomplice Quah Su-Ling, former CEO of Singapore Exchange(SGX)-listed IPCO International, was given 20 years' jail. Soh and Quah had been convicted of 180 and 169 charges respectively after a long-running trial spanning almost 200 days and involving close to 100 prosecution witnesses.

From August 2012 to October 2013, Quah and Soh artificially inflated the share prices of three penny stocks: Blumont, Asiasons and LionGold. They controlled, obtained financing for, conducted illegitimate trading activity in and coordinated their use of 189 securities trading accounts. These accounts were held with 20 financial institutions in the names of 60 individuals and companies.

The bulk of their charges - 106 counts of deception - were for deceiving financial institutions by concealing their involvement when giving instructions to make orders and trades. Soh was additionally found guilty of witness tampering by asking four witnesses to lie to investigators after the stock market crash.

The scheme unravelled on Oct 4, 2013 when the share prices of the three companies crashed, erasing S$8 billion in market capitalisation from SGX.

The prosecution had sought 40 years' jail for Soh, and 19-and-a-half years for Quah, who was less culpable. A third co-accused, 59-year-old Goh Hin Calm, was sentenced to 3 years' jail in 2019 after pleading guilty to two charges of false trading and market rigging.

Bellagraph Nova Group Crashed

A Singaporean businessman who made the news in August 2020 - attempting to buy English Premier League football club Newcastle United but left Singapore weeks later amid allegations of accounting irregularities has been caught in China. Entrepreneur Nelson Loh Ne-Loon, a director of Novena Global Healthcare Group, was sent back to Singapore on Saturday (Dec 24), along with an employee of the company. Loh and and his employee Wong Soon Yuh, both 43, were arrested on the same day. They were charged in court on Monday with two counts of forgery, the police said in a statement.    

Loh also headed the Bellagraph Nova Group along with his cousin Terence Loh and their Chinese business partner, Evangeline Shen. The company had attempted to buy English Premier League club Newcastle United in August 2020 for £280 million (S$490 million at that time) but reports about manipulated photos used in its marketing materials started to emerge.  

Prior to that, not much was known about Bellagraph Nova Group, though it claimed then it had 31 business "entities" worldwide, with a group revenue of US$12 billion (S$16.43 billion) in 2019 and 23,000 employees. 

Nelson Loh was declared a bankrupt in early 2021, according to reports.

Forged Audited Financial Statements - The police said on Monday that Loh and Wong, a Singaporean who worked closely with him, had allegedly forged audited financial statements of NGHG in 2019, and used those statements to obtain bank loans amounting to S$18 million.

It was previously reported that Novena Global Healthcare and Novena Life Sciences had failed to file annual returns due on July 29, 2018 and Dec 9, 2019 respectively.

Days after the pair left Singapore in early September 2020, the police received a report that signatures of accounting firm Ernst & Young had allegedly been forged on some of NHGH’s financial statements.

Warrants of arrest and Interpol Red Notices — request to law enforcement agencies worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person, pending extradition, surrender or similar legal action — were subsequently issued against them. The two men were then detained by the Chinese authorities and returned to Singapore on Dec 24, where they were arrested by the Commercial Affairs Department,

Cancer Updates 2022 - Malaysia

More than 20,000 new cancer patients, with an average age of over 40 years, are detected in Malaysia every year. There were currently about 100,000 cancer survivors in the country who were living with various types of cancer.

NCSM is planning to implement the 'One District, One Screening' program in all states next year to encourage and facilitate the people in the country to do health screening, especially to detect cancer. It is aimed at detecting cancer at an early stage so that immediate treatment could be carried out, thus preventing cancer cells from spreading and saving lives.

Over the past two years, there were more new cancer patients aged between their late 20s and early 30s. The age of individuals diagnosed with cancer is now younger and the number of children with cancer is also high.

For men, there are 10 types of cancer that often affect them and the highest category recorded is bowel cancer, followed by lung, prostate, lymphoma, nasopharynx, liver, leukemia, stomach, skin and bladder. 

For women, the highest case involved breast cancer, followed by colorectal or bowel, cervix, lung, ovary, corpus uteri, lymphoma, thyroid, leukemia and skin.

However, he said, the number of cervical cancer patients had dropped in recent years, believed to be due to the administration of the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine for school students, especially among teenage girls as young as 13 years old.