Two men have been convicted in a Singapore court for their roles in a major document falsification case linked to the collapsed German financial services company Wirecard AG. The convictions are connected to the creation of false letters confirming the existence of hundreds of millions of dollars that were never actually held in escrow accounts.
The convicted individuals are R Shanmugaratnam, a 59-year-old Singaporean and director of the local accounting firm Citadelle Corporate Services, and James Henry O'Sullivan, a 50-year-old British national. The court found that O'Sullivan instigated Shanmugaratnam to issue the fraudulent documents.
District Judge Kow Keng Siong found the two men guilty of their respective charges following a hearing on Monday, September 22. The judge stated he would release his full written grounds for the decision by the end of the week. Shanmugaratnam was convicted on 13 charges for falsifying balance confirmation letters with fraudulent intent between 2016 and 2018. O'Sullivan was found guilty on five charges for abetting Shanmugaratnam by instigating him to issue five of those false letters in 2017.
The fraudulent letters contained serious misrepresentations that Citadelle Corporate Services held sums totaling over 1.1 billion euros in escrow for Wirecard AG and its related companies for financial periods between 2015 and 2017. In reality, no such funds were held in the company's bank accounts as claimed in the documents.
The two men became acquainted in 2010 when O'Sullivan engaged Citadelle's services to set up companies in Singapore. Their professional relationship deepened over time, with Citadelle providing corporate secretarial services to 30 of O'Sullivan's companies. Shanmugaratnam was registered as a director of one entity used to register O'Sullivan's employment pass in Singapore and to pay him a monthly salary of 50,000 Singapore dollars for consultancy work.
O'Sullivan was a long-time business partner and friend of Jan Marsalek, the former chief operating officer of Wirecard AG who has been named in an Interpol Red Notice and was allegedly responsible for Wirecard's business in Asia. O'Sullivan introduced Marsalek to Shanmugaratnam sometime before July 2015, which led to Shanmugaratnam being asked to act as an escrow agent between Wirecard entities and O'Sullivan's companies.
The prosecution argued that Shanmugaratnam, as a trained accountant, would have known the serious nature of the misrepresentations contained in the formal letters issued by his company. They stated there was "no innocent explanation for his conduct" and rejected his defense that he believed the letters were for innocent purposes as "illogical." Similarly, the prosecution dismissed O'Sullivan's defense that his Telegram and email accounts had been hacked, calling this claim "absurd" given the overwhelming documentary evidence.
The pair will return to court for mitigation and sentencing in November. The penalty for falsifying documents and for abetment of such an offence carries a maximum jail term of up to 10 years, a fine, or both.
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