Billion-dollar money laundering case: Suspect gets new charges of using forged papers, having criminal proceeds
SINGAPORE — Lin Baoying, the only woman among 10 suspects in Singapore's multibillion-dollar money-laundering investigation, was on Tuesday (May 21) handed seven new charges.The new charges are related to the possession of suspected criminal proceeds and forgeries that were submitted to banks.
After the charges were tendered, Lin's lawyer Mr Chew Kei-jin informed the court that she wished to plead guilty.
Lin then spoke up and asked the judge for an early date for her plea. The 44-year-old Chinese national appeared via video-link and followed proceedings through a Mandarin interpreter.
The fresh charges mean that Lin now stands accused of a total of 10 offences. She was previously charged with forging documents to sell a property in Macau and for lying that she had not prepared the sales document.
The two original charges of forgery were amended on Monday.
Lin is now accused of submitting a forged agreement of a property sale in Macau to justify deposits of nearly HK$122.5 million (S$21.1 million) in a CIMB Bank account and HK$75 million in a Standard Chartered Bank account.
In the fresh charges, she is similarly accused of submitting forged property sale documents to UOB Kay Hian and the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), to justify deposits of HK$12.5 million across both accounts.
She is charged with having almost HK$210 million suspected of being at least partly criminal proceeds, held across her four bank accounts.
She also allegedly conspired with one Liu Kai and one Li Hongmin to forge a tax payment certificate with the intention of using it to cheat Bank Julius Baer & Co.
Lin will return to court for a pre-trial conference on Thursday.
Her partner, Zhang Ruijin, 45, was sentenced to 15 months' jail after pleading guilty to three charges in April for his role in the money-laundering operation.
The couple was arrested in a bungalow along Pearl Island at Sentosa Cove last August.
The prosecution previously said that Lin had a teenage daughter who lived in Beach Road with a domestic helper, while she lived separately in Sentosa.
The combined assets between Lin and Zhang came to about S$325 million, with Lin having the larger share of the pie, a court previously heard.
More than S$3 billion in assets have been seized or frozen in relation to the case, making it Singapore's largest money-laundering probe and likely one of the largest money-laundering operations in the world.
Six of the 10 suspects have been convicted and sentenced to between 13 months and 15 months in jail. They have forfeited more than S$540 million in assets to the state so far. CNA
