SINGAPORE – A conveyancing lawyer was charged with forgery on July 16, with court documents linking her alleged actions to an associate of one of the 10 foreigners convicted in the $3 billion money laundering case.
Chan I-Fei Julia, 61, is said to have abetted one Lim Lai Hong to create a false document that was signed by a person named Chen Lingling sometime around Dec 14, 2023.
The document was related to Chen’s purchase of a property at South Beach Residences at 28 Beach Road.
Court documents did not provide any information about Lim and Chen.
Checks by The Straits Times showed that Chen was previously identified by authorities as one of the associates of the 10 foreigners convicted in the money laundering case.
She was named as a shareholder in several firms that held commercial real estate, including a four-storey shophouse on North Bridge Road that fetched $42 million in a high-profile property sale.
The case against Chan, a director at Sterling Law, will be mentioned again on Aug 13.
For forgery, an offender can be jailed for up to four years, fined, or both.
The Ministry of Law (MinLaw) had in 2025 taken four law firms and one lawyer to task for anti-money laundering breaches over the purchase of properties in connection with the $3 bilion money laundering case.
It followed inquiries by the Director of Legal Services (DLS), which is a department under MinLaw that oversees the regulation of all law practice entities and the registration of foreign lawyers in Singapore.
The DLS had ordered one law practice to pay a financial penalty of $30,000, and a second law firm to pay $100,000, the maximum penalty.
A third law practice was issued a statutory notice of the intention to order it to pay a financial penalty of $70,000.
DLS also privately reprimanded a fourth law practice, and referred one lawyer to the Law Society of Singapore for disciplinary action.
MinLaw did not name the four law practices and the lawyer.
The ministry had in June 2025 issued a guidance note to the legal industry to remind law practices and lawyers of their responsibilities under their statutory anti-money laundering obligations.
They include analysing client risk, identifying material red flags, establishing a client’s source of wealth and the timeline for filing a suspicious transaction report (STR).
All law practices and lawyers are subject to anti-money laundering obligations under the Legal Profession Act.
MinLaw said then that a law practice or lawyer also must file an STR with the police if they suspect the client may be engaged in money laundering.
The 10 foreigners directly involved in the money laundering case, one of the worst in Singapore, were in 2024 sentenced to between 13 and 17 months’ jail on charges relating to money laundering, fraud and forgery.
All have been deported and barred from re-entering Singapore after serving their jail terms.