By admin 
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — A Singapore oil tycoon was sentenced Monday to 17.5 years in prison for fraud and forgery in a case that prosecutors say has tarnished the city-state’s reputation as Asia’s top oil trading center.
Lim Oon Kuin, 82, was convicted in May of two counts of defrauding the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. (HSBC) and one for complicity in forgery. The court found that Lim used forged documents on two bogus oil transactions to trick HSBC into disbursing credits totaling $111.7 million, in one of Singapore’s biggest cases of trade finance fraud.
Lim, a Chinese immigrant, founded Hin Leong Trading in 1963. It grew into one of Asia’s largest oil trading companies. It collapsed in 2020 after a failed bet that oil prices would rebound after China’s containment of COVID-19.
Judge Toh Han Li was quoted by The Straits Times on Monday as saying a deterrent penalty was needed to “prevent violations from permeating Singapore’s financial ecosystem” that could prompt banks to impose stricter compliance rules or halt their trade finance services to make.
Lim has appealed the sentence and is out on bail, the report said.