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Mar 30, 2011
Man who ran Ponzi scheme jailed for 80 months
By Elena Chong
A MAN who ran a large Ponzi scheme by promising high returns to his investors in futures trading was jailed for 80 months on Wednesday.
Dickson Tan Jing Yun took nearly $6 million in investment funds from 46 people from September 2004 to October 2008.
He paid out only $1.5 million to the investors, including principal repayments. No other restitution has been made, with $4.5 million lost either through trading or personal use.
Tan, 37, pleaded guilty last week to running a business of fund management without holding a capital markets services licence between 2004 and 2008.
He also admitted to 10 charges of criminal breach of trust of $1.2 million, of which $834,332 or 67 per cent of the total sum were dishonestly converted to his own use.
Senior District Judge See Kee Oon, who took another 22 charges into consideration, agreed with Deputy Public Prosecutor Christopher Ong Siu Jin that there were aggravating features in the case which called for a stiff sentence.
'The premise was to lure additional investors to join the scheme while seemingly making good on initial promises of guaranteed fixed returns - essentially a confidence trick repeated many times over on potential unsuspecting victims,'' said the judge.
He said Tan clearly planned his offences, and had systematically repeated his pattern of offending, A number of his clients were not well-educated and a few were above 50 years old.
Tan was an insurance agent in 2004 when he ran the scheme on the sidelines.
He then joined another company as an associate manager and his last appointment was a branch manager with an insurance broker December 2007.
