Voice 9, International Desk: A 70-year-old lawyer of Punjabi descent pleaded guilty to two charges of criminal breach of trust totaling around SGD 4,59,000 and a violation of the Legal Profession Act.
According to Deputy Public Prosecutor Norman
Yew, Gurdaib Singh Pala Singh stole the funds between November 18 and December
23, 2014, using them to pay for things like Gurdaib Cheong and
Partners' (GCP) office costs.
Singh, who was called to the bar in 1981,
will also face a third criminal breach of trust allegation that is worth
another SGD 21,000, according to a report from The Straits Times newspaper.
According to The Straits Times, Zulkifli Osman
employed GCP's services in December 2010 to sell his late father's apartment.
The apartment was eventually sold in 2011, and GCP collected more than
S$356,000 from the transaction. Zulkifli and Singh agreed that the former's
brother would get S$138,876.50 of that total. On December 15, 2011, Zulkifli
placed S$138,876 as his brother's share of the sales profits into GCP's client
account to be kept in escrow.
However, Singh misappropriated Zulkifli's funds
in GCP's client account between December 20, 2011, and May 3, 2012, by writing
checks to cover other expenses, such as the company's office costs. Between
August 2012 and July 2014, Zulkifli asked Singh three times for partial
withdrawals of the funds without realizing that they had already been spent in
full. Singh then used funds from the GCP customer account that belonged to the
firm's other clients to pay Zulkifli a total of S$10,156.
Zulkifli requested Singh release the final
S$128,720 from the funds in June 2015, but the criminal did not do so. After
being removed from the company's records in 2018, Singh consented to represent
a guy in a divorce. The man, unaware that Singh had been struck off the rolls,
paid him S$1,750 between September 7 and 27, 2019. In 2020, the man asked Singh
for a full refund as he no longer wanted his services, following which the offender
returned S$1,000 to him.
Despite having his name removed from the
registers in 2018, Singh continued to represent a guy the following year,
according to the investigation. On August 24, Singh's mitigation and sentence
are anticipated to occur.
