JLC Advisors' Jeffrey Ong charged with misappropriating S$17.5m from CW Group

Singapore

JLC Advisors managing partner Jeffrey Ong Su Aun was charged on Tuesday with misappropriating S$17.5 million belonging to CW Group Holdings, which was delisted from the Hong Kong stock exchange earlier this month.

These charges have come a year after the 43-year-old lawyer tendered his resignation as independent non-executive director of the precision machine tool maker.

Ong first grabbed headlines last May after Catalist-listed precision engineering firm Allied Technologies repeatedly failed to recover from his law firm a sum of S$33 million held in escrow. He was uncontactable when the funds were found to be missing.

The Singaporean is now accused of practising the same modus operandi on CW Group, and was on Tuesday slapped with 19 charges.

These fresh charges included 14 counts for misappropriation of funds from August 2015 to June 2016.

Ong was also said to have tricked CW Group's auditor Ernst & Young Solutions (EY) into believing that CW's Singapore subsidiaries still had several millions in escrow.

This led to EY giving a clean opinion on its audit of these CW units. Consequently, Ong faces four counts of cheating the auditor.

Further, he allegedly cheated the board of CW Group on Aug 29, 2018 into believing that 49.6 million euros had been transferred from CW Group's escrow account to a company called Kingsblade Kabushiki Kaisha.

The board was said to be under the impression that Kingsblade was holding the funds on behalf of a CW Group subsidiary and had not investigated the money missing from the escrow account.

Ong was said to have committed many of these offences in conspiracy with Wong Koon Lup. CW's chief executive at that time was a person named Wong Koon Lup, but the charge sheets did not specify if Ong's co-conspirator was this same person.

The Business Times understands that the prosecution has not charged the alleged accomplice.

The new charges bring the total number of offences that Ong faces to 76.

The next court mention for him is Nov 25, and he will continue to be remanded in the meantime.

CW Group slipped into insolvency in June 2018 and is currently in provisional liquidation. Its financial woes came to light when it defaulted on S$55.25 million of Singapore dollar-denominated notes, after plans to refinance the debt through the Singapore bond market fell through.

CW Group has maintained a minimal level of business operations, according to a notice dated Oct 7 put up by its provisional liquidators.