MONEY laundering accused Chen Qingyuan was on Friday (Nov 17) denied bail on the grounds that he was a flight risk, has tenuous roots in Singapore and is purportedly already wanted in China on fraud charges.

The court also heard about his links to several companies in Singapore, including an IT firm that reportedly pulled in S$12 million in revenue last year. But prosecutors said his legitimate business interests here accounted for only a small portion of his assets.

District Judge Brenda Tan said that with him facing serious charges in Singapore involving large sums of money, he could well go on the run again, she added. And with business interests outside Singapore involving “millions of dollars”, he can procure new passports, abscond and live comfortably overseas, she said.

As it is, he was able to procure passports from Dominica and Cambodia through investments; he paid between US$50,000 and US$60,000 for the Dominican passport, despite not having visited Dominica.

Chen, one of 10 foreigners charged over their alleged involvement in a S$2.8 billion money laundering case, had claimed that his salary from his companies in Singapore was the source of his funds.

But according to the calculations by the investigating officer (IO), his salary would account for under 2 per cent of his total assets, said Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Foo Shi Hao.

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The IO said in his affidavit that Chen faces charges involving around S$8 million. Around S$25 million of assets owned by Chen, his girlfriend Wang Qiujiao and their companies have been seized or slapped with disposal prohibition.

DPP Foo said the accused has so far not produced evidence that his funds come from profits from his companies. One of these companies, which Chen described as his “chief venture”, was Hicloud Technology, a company offering cloud solutions and services.

Chen’s lawyer, Gary Low of Drew & Napier, revealed during the bail review that Hicloud made around S$12 million in revenue in 2022.

According to data compiled by The Business Times, Chen has links to five other IT and e-commerce companies in Singapore.

Low, his lawyer, argued that his client has been in Singapore since 2019, and was “deeply embedded” here through his “significant business interests” in the Republic.

Before bail was denied, Low had argued that Chen’s current passports had been impounded, and that he had no means to procure new ones. The lawyer also said that because of the global attention this case has garnered, the prospect of any country granting him a new passport now was “virtually non-existent”.

“In any event, he has no means to make large investments and donations, as his assets and accounts have all been frozen.”

Low also argued that there was no risk of Chen colluding with other interested parties in the case. To the IO’s point that Chen could collude only with his girlfriend Wang, Low noted that Wang had turned up at the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD) for questioning many times. She has, since Oct 2, also been allowed to see Chen while he was in remand, despite investigations still being underway, he said.

Another accused individual in the case, Vang Shuiming, has been denied visits by his family. Low said this meant that the CAD’s concern of collusion was non-existent.

In response a question by the judge on Wang’s visits to Chen, DPP Foo said the authorities had weighed the risk of collusion and evidence tampering against allowing her to see him on humanitarian grounds. In this case, the authorities had decided that she be allowed to visit him, but that this only showed that “one factor has outweighed the other”, said DPP Foo.

However, as Chen was also considered a flight risk, the risk of collusion was also taken into account when the prosecution made the case against granting him bail, he added. DPP Foo noted that the police had found out that Chen was allegedly wanted by the Chinese authorities based on a poster from Anxi province that stated the accused had allegedly committed fraud.

He noted that Chen had at first categorically denied in his affidavit that he was a wanted man in his home country, but when he was shown the poster by the IO, he admitted that he had avoided returning to China because of his wanted status.

While the defence claimed that Chen had stayed in China until September 2019, several months after the notice was issued in February 2019, this assertion was unsubstantiated in the accused’s affidavit, said DPP Foo.

The prosecutor said that Chen’s business interests in Singapore must be viewed in the context of the rest of his business portfolio: Apart from Singapore, Chen has business interests in Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and the Philippines.

The prosecutor further pointed out that Chen’s family has been shown to be capable of moving from place to another, even without him in the picture. They had moved to Singapore before he did.

In addition, while Chen’s girlfriend Wang has not left the country, there is a possibility of both of them absconding if he is let out on bail. The reason she has not left Singapore so far is that such a move would “demolish any chance of Chen being let out on bail”, said DPP Foo.

Chen returns to court for a pre-trial conference on Dec 22. Another accused, Wang Baosen, will do so on the same date. He was denied bail on Nov 16.