Judge rules against group that claimed it had $20m deal to buy property

A COURT has ruled against a group who claimed they had a deal to buy a Ridout Road bungalow for $20 million. The move paves the way for the owner, Indonesian-born businessman Agus Anwar, to sell the house for $37 million to a banker who served the late Nina Wang, who was Asia’s richest woman.

Two parties – EC Investment Holding, owned by Mr Tan Koo Chuan of Yi Kai Group and Mr Melvin Poh of Fission Group, and former Goldman Sachs banker Thomas Chan – were fighting for control of the house at 39A Ridout Road that Mr Agus bought in 2006.

But three months ago, the High Court ordered the sale of the property in the upmarket Holland district to Mr Chan for $37 million.

The purchase of the two-storey property by Mr Chan – which sits on a 40,600 sq ft plot, complete with a tennis court and swimming pool in the good-class bungalow area – is expected to be concluded some time this month.

But the story may not be over yet. EC Investment Holding has filed an appeal to overturn the sale with the hearing expected to be held in March, sources say.

Mr Agus originally acquired the 40,600 sq ft house for $28 million in 2006. He had paid $11 million and the stamp duty of over $744,000 from his own funds, and taking the balance of $17 million from a $30 million facility extended to him by Hong Leong Finance.

However, the financial crisis hit his finances and, on May 16, 2008, Hong Leong Finance recalled the loan and terminated the facility after Mr Agus failed to make his payments.

‘Agus Anwar was coming under increasing financial pressure. His investments were then badly hit by the global financial crisis sparked off by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008,’ according to a High Court judgment dated September this year.

EC Investment Holding claims that in the terms of a deal dated June 8 last year, it was granted an option to buy Mr Agus’ property for $20 million, in exchange for a $1.5 million option fee. Mr Chan also obtained an option to buy the property for $37 million on Oct 8 last year.

Justice Quentin Loh, in his September judgment, noted that EC Investment knew before it entered into the transaction that Mr Agus was desperate for a short-term loan.

He said that EC Investment Holding’s Mr Tan ‘feigned ignorance on many things and kept up the simple mantra that he was only interested in property, smelt a good deal and went after it’.

Based on the evidence, the court did not grant EC Investment’s request that the sale be completed.

EC’s Yi Kai and Fission are behind the development Alexis along Alexandra Road.

As for Mr Chan, Justice Loh said that ‘everyone accepted that he had innocently walked straight into this melee’. Mr Chan had wanted to buy a bungalow and after being introduced to the property, acted decisively in putting down an option fee. He did not meet Mr Agus at all and was unaware of the earlier option.

Mr Agus, said to be in his late 50s and now a Singaporean, is no stranger to court battles.

In January, he was ordered by the High Court to make good on the payment of a $10.5 million loan he received two years ago from an investment firm while in financial difficulty.

Mr Agus was once a significant shareholder in two Indonesian banks, PT Bank Kredit Asia and PT Bank Pelita, but there was a run on these banks during the 1997 financial meltdown and they were taken over by the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency.

Mr Agus came to Singapore in 2000 and became a citizen in 2004 – the same year he made headlines for allegedly owing the Indonesian government 3.2 trillion rupiah, or $467 million.

The $37 million will help him clear more of his debt – as of the middle of this year, he had personal available assets of nearly $60 million, but owed creditors $103.3 million.

But, with March’s appeal hearing on the horizon, the wrangle over the Ridout property could drag on.

Source: Straits Times, 2 Dec 2010

He faked signatures on tenancy agreement and pocketed $1,000 a month from rentals

A REAL estate agent forged two copies of a tenancy agreement to pocket $1,000 monthly from the rental of an apartment without the knowledge of both landlord and tenant.

Yesterday, David Wee Sim Chye, 47, was fined $4,000 by District Judge Toh Yung Cheong after he admitted to one charge of forgery.

A district court heard that operations manager Pek Kain Hock, 51, engaged Wee to rent out his condominium unit at Parc Oasis in Jurong East in May 2007.

Wee, who runs his own business, YMB International Realtors, managed to find a tenant, American Warren Duplantis.

But the real estate agent had forged the signatures of the tenant and Mr Pek on the two copies of the tenancy agreement.

Mr Duplantis ended up paying a monthly rental of $5,800, which was $1,000 more than the $4,800 that was agreed between Wee and Mr Pek.

Five months later, the American met Mr Pek to discuss the early termination of the tenancy agreement.

He told the landlord that his own signature in Mr Pek’s copy of the tenancy agreement had been forged.

Mr Pek also learnt that the tenant’s copy of the tenancy agreement had stated a monthly rental of $5,800, and his signature in that document had also been forged.

Investigations showed that Wee had committed the forgeries to pocket a sum of $1,000 monthly from the tenancy agreement.

His lawyer told the court that the father of two had contacted the tenant in October 2007 to return the difference to him, well before the charges were preferred.

Full restitution of the money was made in June this year.

Wee, who had a second charge considered, could have been jailed for up to four years and/or fined.

Source: Straits Times, 26 Nov 2010

Man wrote cheque for option fee to seller’s law firm, instead of to seller as earlier agreed

AN INVESTMENT banker lost his chance to buy an $18.5 million bungalow in Ewart Park when his cheque for the option fee was made out to the seller’s law firm instead of to the seller.

He then sought High Court action to enforce the sale and stop the owner from reselling to anyone else, but his claim was dismissed by Justice Belinda Ang on Tuesday. Her judgment grounds were released yesterday.

The judge said that the seller, Ms Soon Chia Chuen, 38, was entitled to the $184,000 option fee the buyer, Mr Zain Asif Fancy, 36, had paid. This was 1 per cent of the selling price.

He had, through his lawyers, made out a cheque for the remaining 4 per cent, or $738,400, to the law firm representing Ms Soon.

Mr Zain had believed it was sufficient to comply with the clause specified in the sale contract.

His lawyers from Tan Peng Chin LLC, who handled the deal, hand-delivered the cheque and the accompanying sales acceptance documents to Ms Soon’s lawyers from Derrick Wong & Lim on the day of the deadline in August.

But when she found out the cheque had been made out to her lawyers, she refused to continue with the sale.

She pointed out the deal was clinched after several rounds of talks, on the understanding that the cheque was to be made payable to her.

She had argued in court documents that she wanted the cheque to be in her name as she needed the money quickly to book a house in Trevose Crescent that she wanted to buy as a replacement.

The longer the delay on that deal, the higher the prices went as the seller was getting better offers from others, she said.

The property market was booming then, and Ms Soon had, among other things, ‘reluctantly’ agreed to a five-week period for Mr Zain to exercise the option instead of the usual two weeks.

She was concerned that prices would rise further and she would lose out if he opted not to buy after a five-week wait.

He had already paid the 1 per cent option fee in June and the remaining 4 per cent that he paid to exercise the option to buy became the subject of the court dispute.

Lawyers say that in a property deal, the money is normally paid to the law firm acting for the seller, which will keep it as a stakeholder in the sale.

This is to safeguard the money in case the deal derails for various reasons – such as if the seller subsequently dies, or is a bankrupt or cannot go through with the sale for some reason.

Mr Zain said in court documents that the property was ‘of particular significance’ to him as it ‘sits on a large and uniquely sited plot of land in one of Singapore’s most exclusive and prestigious ‘Good Class Bungalows’ enclaves and is a rare find in land-scarce Singapore’.

His lawyer, Senior Counsel Alvin Yeo from WongPartnership, whom he hired separately to fight the High Court case, argued that the $738,400 cheque to be issued in Ms Soon’s name was not something that had to be strictly complied with.

But lawyer Prabhakaran Nair for Ms Soon countered that acceptance must match the offer in the way it was agreed upon.

Justice Ang said that sending the cheque to Ms Soon’s lawyers ‘was contrary to what was already agreed…which was for the cheque in (Ms Soon’s) favour to be forthwith released to her’.

Source: Straits Times, 23 Oct 2010

Compensation for condo foul-up must be pegged to market price: Judge
A COUPLE who sued a law firm for blowing their chance to buy a $3.5 million flat will get compensation pegged to the market price of the property at the time of the court hearing in 2008.

The High Court ruling means the law firm will have to pay Mr Ong Hien Yeow and his wife a sum that would have enabled them to buy a similar unit had their plans to buy the flat not been derailed by the firm, Central Chambers LLC.

Mr Ong had wanted to buy the unit at The Seafront On Meyer in Meyer Road in 2007. Central Chambers was a day late in exercising his option, and failed to meet the April 17, 2007 deadline.

The developers, CRL Realty, refused to sell because of the delay. The couple, who had wanted the flat as their matrimonial home, sued the law firm for the loss caused, after futile efforts to buy an alternative unit.

Previously, the lower court had held that the amount payable should be pegged to the time when the law firm botched the couple’s plans, in April 2007.

The ruling capped a case with extra-ordinary circumstances.

Ordinarily, it would be unusual for a significant difference to occur when damages are assessed.

But in this case, there was a huge increase in the value of the unit between the contract date in April 2007, when it was valued at $3.53 million, and the start of the court assessment hearings from April 2008. In May that year, the value of the property had soared to $5.38 million. Central Chambers acknowledged its fault in a November 2007 court hearing, and the issue was how much the couple should be paid in damages.

As this was a negligence claim, insurers for the law firm moved in for the hearing before a High Court Assistant Registrar in 2008 to assess the sum.

Lawyer Imran Khwaja from Tan Rajah & Cheah, acting for the insurers, argued the price should be pegged to within a reasonable time from when the fault occurred in April 2007.

But Senior Counsel Vinodh Coomara-swamy from Shook Lin & Bok, representing the Ongs, countered that the sum to be paid should be the $1.85 million difference between the original $3.53 million asking price for the unit in April 2007 and the new $5.38 million price at which the developer re-released the unit on the market in May 2008. Such a sum would take in the ‘current market price of equivalent units in the same development’, court documents said.

An assistant registrar in September 2008 awarded the couple about $418,000. This sum was based on the difference in price of the flat within about two months of the law firm’s mistake. Both sides appealed against the decision.

Justice Kan Ting Chiu, in a reserved judgment published yesterday, ruled that the quantum be based on the price of the unit during the time when the court hearings took place, between April and September 2008.

He ordered the case to be remitted to the High Court assistant registrar for the damages to be re-assessed as directed.

Source: Straits Times, 21 Oct 2010

One of them demands $2m, but court awards him $74k

A palatial bungalow sits at 20A Meng Suan Road, in stark contrast to Nos. 20 to 28 – old one-storey terrace houses, most of them with zinc roofs.

Over the past 10 years, families and workers have moved in and out of the nine terrace houses, which sit on land owned by Mr Ong Beng Chong, who lives in the bungalow.

In recent years, Mr Ong has been trying to get the occupants out so that he could redevelop the land.

The job looks simple enough, given that he is the landlord and calls the shots.

Except that the 21,066 sq ft piece of land in Mandai has a history that dates back to the 1950s, when people could own the land, and let others build houses on it in return for ‘ground rent’.

In this case, that amounted to between $7 and $20 a month.

As of January 2008, the plot had an indicative price of around $250 to $260 per sq ft. Inclusive of the development charge, this would put its worth at about $5 million.

Mr Ong sent quit notices to tenants, with offers of compensation.

But he found several unwilling to budge.

Then the takeover battle started.

In March last year, he sued to evict the home owners of Nos. 21 and 23 after they refused his $40,000 compensation. He failed.

Justice Lai Siu Chiu ruled that Mr Ong’s father had, in 1959, sold the two houses to Mr Yeo Ang Moo and Ms Victoria Jayaram’s father, at a price for which they could have bought houses outright in other parts of Singapore.

Mr Ong’s offer of $40,000 compensation then was ‘derisory’ and not a reasonable sum compared to the $5 million he stood to gain by auctioning off the land on which the row of houses stood.

Although Mr Ong lost the suit then, he appealed further and the case was subsequently settled through mediation.

He acquired the two units and the land they sat on.

He then moved on to acquire one more unit, settling the matter with the unit owner out of court.

Retiree Goh Kim Thong of No. 24, however, held out. He refused $225,000 and wanted between $1.8 million and $2 million instead. Mr Ong applied to evict him.

Mr Goh had bought the house for $10,000 in 1983 from the previous owner and lived there, paying a $7 monthly ground rent.

Based on the original 1959 agreement, Mr Goh argued in court he was entitled ‘to squat on the land at $7 per month until the 999-year lease ran out in 2883′, according to court documents.

Twice, the High Court warned Mr Goh that he might not end up getting the amount he wanted.

Twice, Mr Goh insisted on pressing his case, never mind that independent valuers had placed the value of the 51-year-old buildings at between $67,000 and $74,000 – far lower than what he had been offered.

Mr Goh, who represented himself, had taken what Justice Chan Seng Onn described as ‘a gamble’.

He lost.

Justice Chan said the law to repossess such land is clear. The original land owner could retake the land as long as the building owner was reasonably compensated.

He awarded him $74,000 for the house based on its present condition and ordered him to hand over the premises within four months.

Mr Goh, who does not live at No. 24, signalled that he would be fighting on with an appeal.

The house is now occupied by six workers from Malaysia who are renting the house for $180 each. Mr Pang Kah Peng, 48, a tiling worker who has been living there for six years, said: ‘We’ve heard before that we are supposed to move out, but we still don’t know when. No one has told us anything.’

It is now four units down for Mr Ong. Two others are occupied by Mr Ong’s family and relatives.

That leaves just Nos. 22, 26 and 28.

No. 28 is owned by the Lim Clan Association. Member Lim Teck Huat, 78, a retiree, said the clan had been offered $225,000 for it, but may want to ask for more.

‘We have been here for over 20 years and don’t have an alternative location yet. The house is so big, surely we should be given more,’ he said.

The caretaker of the clan’s premises, Mr Soh Boon Ang, 71, has a different problem: ‘I’ve been living here alone for 10 years. I’ll have nowhere to go if we have to move out and I have to get an HDB flat.’

Source: Sunday Times, 11 Jul 2010

If there is no evidence that a ‘squatter’ paying ground rent is entitled to stay on the land permanently, then he needs only to be compensated reasonably for his house, Justice Chan Seng Onn had said.

He added that the law to repossess such land is clear.

The case has a precedent. In 1973, a landowner successfully evicted someone who bought an attap house on his land and paid $3 ground rent per month.

The judge had concluded that the landowner should be allowed to recover possession of the land, provided he made reasonable compensation to the defendant.

Lawyers said the latest case was a throwback to more than 50 years ago when it was a practice for some landowners to allow others to build houses on their land and reside in these houses, provided they continued to pay rent for the land as ground tenants.

Mr Patrick Tan, a lawyer who handles property cases, said it is very rare to find people paying ground rent in Singapore now.

‘Most of the time now, a landowner will own both the structure on the land and the land. Developers, for example, will buy both the property and land when a place goes en bloc,’ he said.

He added that the case is ‘archaic and complicated’ and that, in the past, the only way for a tenant to lay claim to the land was to prove he had an ‘interest’, that is, had developed roots and ownership there over a very long period.

Another property lawyer, who declined to be named, said the practice of ground rent dates back to the time of slums when it would have cost landowners nothing to allow a tenant to beautify and improve their land by squatting on it and building a house.

Source: Sunday Times, 11 Jul 2010

They say flats, in son’s name, were for investment but son claims they were gifts to him

AN AGED couple from Taiwan have sued their son in the Singapore High Court for the return of the title deeds of two condominium apartments worth about $1.7 million.

In their lawsuit, Mr Yang Min-hao, 76, and Madam Yang Yuan Hsiang-ying, 71, said they funded the $344,500 downpayment for the flats but used their son’s name as they were worried about not being able to get a bank loan.

The couple, who live in Taipei, say that their son was merely holding the properties and rental incomes from the flats in trust for them.

Their son, Mr Yang Chuang-yang, 49, who has lived in Singapore for more than 10 years, does not dispute he did not take part in the property purchases. But he claims that his parents gave the flats to him – an assertion the couple, who have five other children, deny.

The three-day hearing, which started yesterday, revolves around apartments in Parc Oasis in Jurong, bought in 1992, and Central Green in Tiong Bahru, bought in 1993.

The couple arranged for their daughter, Ms Yang Sheng Cheng, who was then living in Singapore, to buy the properties, telling her to rent out the units and use the income to service the housing loan instalments, property taxes and maintenance fees.

To secure the housing loan, the couple decided to put the properties in Chuang-yang’s name. He was still in Taiwan at the time.

The couple transferred $160,000 for the Parc Oasis apartment and $184,500 for the Central Green apartment to Sheng Cheng as downpayment.

The rest was funded by housing loans obtained by Sheng Cheng here, and the couple later transferred money to her to maintain the apartments, which were rented out. The couple said they had explicitly told their son that the flats were intended for investment purposes and to serve as a source of income during their retirement.

In 1997, Chuang-yang moved to Singapore and, two years later, took over his sister’s task of collecting rent. In October 2007, he signed a letter promising that in the event both properties were sold, he would give all the proceeds to his mother.

But when they asked him for the title deeds last year, he refused to hand them over unless they paid him $250,000.

In his defence, Chuang-yang said he was initially not aware that his parents had bought the apartments in his name and found out about it only in 2000. He claims the money did not come from his parents but from the boyfriend of another sister.

Chuang-yang denies that he was holding the properties or rental income in trust for his parents, saying instead that the flats were meant for him as gifts.

Source: Straits Times, 25 May 2010

A man was sentenced to 16 months’ jail in a district court on Monday for cheating four China nationals of S$10,700 in rental fees.

Ivan Tey, who is 35, owns a four-room flat in Jurong West.

Although he had rented the flat to other tenants, he approached different housing agents in October and November last year to look for prospective tenants to rent the flat to.

He found four different tenants and collected rental deposits from them.

The tenants later realised Tey had signed tenancy agreements with other tenants and found other tenants living in the flat.

They then separately made police reports.

Tey’s lawyer, Mr Joseph Chen, told the court that Tey committed the offences as he was in financial difficulty and had to support two young children.

He said Tey’s father is receiving treatment for cancer and urged the court to impose a shorter jail sentence.

Source: Channel News Asia, 24 May 2010

A tiny piece of a condominium development encroaching onto State land is making some residents see red, and they now want the developer to tear down and rebuild the affected wall, or buy over the 15 sq m plot of land from the Government.

The infringement occurred when the development was being built in the 1990s. Great Victoria Development (GVD), through its interim management council, had negotiated with the authorities for a temporary occupation licence (TOL) for the encroaching portion of land.

But the residents of Country Grandeur in Lorong Puntong allegedly only discovered there was a TOL during the annual general meeting last December, when someone questioned the $120 payment to the authorities for the licence – an entry which cropped up in the accounts of the estate’s management corporation.

The plot in question is a strip of land, about the size of a small room, by the wall in the swimming pool area.

Residents said they were unhappy that they were not informed that GVD had negotiated with the authorities for a TOL.

The developer had run the interim management council for two terms until 1999, when it turned the management of the new estate over to residents.

Some in the 66-unit estate, which is located off Sin Ming Avenue, felt that the developer should have solved the problem instead of passing it on to them.

In a letter to GVD this January, the management council, writing on behalf of residents, gave the developer two alternatives.

One, that it tear down the wall and rebuild it and any facilities affected by the demolition work. Or, two, that it buy over the strip of land with all costs to be borne by GVD.

In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by MediaCorp, residents also demand the developer return all the money tapped from the management corporation’s funds to pay the TOL fee over the years.

Some residents see it as a matter of principle, while others want the issue settled so that they can have peace of mind.

“The amount ($120) is not important but the ramifications are,” said one.

“What would happen if, one day, the Government decides to develop the State land or stop the TOL?”

When contacted, Mr David Hwang, who runs GVD with his father Hwang Sin Jen, declined comment.

GVD owns several units in Country Grandeur and the younger Mr Hwang, who previously served on the management council, is living there with his family.

MediaCorp understands the management council is seeking legal advice.

Source: Today, 12 May 2010

BE CAREFUL if you are looking to rent a home here, or you could fall prey to a rental scam.

This is how it works: A conman, using a fake name, poses as a landlord with rooms for rent at low prices.

He gives fake addresses of apartments in areas like Orchard and Chinatown.

He refuses to arrange for a viewing of the apartments, claiming that he is in Britain on internship and will be back here only by the end of next month.

He asks potential tenants to e-mail him a scan of their passport, and sign a contract e-mailed to them.

He asks them to wire a month’s rent and a security deposit to a Western Union account, and says he will post the keys to them. To reassure them, he sends images of the apartments and a scan of what he claims to be his passport.

A check with a thread on rental scams in Singapore on online forum scamwarners.com showed that at least 14 people have received such messages.

The scammer uses different pseudonyms, like Richard Willem Tibor, Jane Louise Millar and Tan Nee, and asks for sums of between $1,100 and $2,500.

Figures from the police show that, on average, one person falls victim to such rental scams every day. Last year, police received 324 reports of rental scams, down from 355 reports in 2008.

Mr Manuel Nacionales, 44, a Filipino systems analyst who has been working here for four years, almost became a victim.

He posted a request to rent a room on share-accommodation. sg, a website that links potential house- or flat-mates, in February this year.

Within a day, he got an offer of an apartment at 14 Scotts Road ? the address of shopping mall Far East Plaza.

In an e-mail sent from tantongnee@hotmail.com, the sender said he was a Singaporean named Tan Nee and could be called on +44-701-115-1047.

He asked Mr Nacionales to send a month’s rent of $700 and a security deposit of $400 to a Western Union account.

Mr Nacionales did receive a scan of the passport of a man called Tan Tong Nee, but did not wire any money after his colleagues advised him against it.

When my paper called the number posing as a potential tenant, the man identified himself as Tan Nee Long in a pseudo- British accent.

Pressed for the address of the rental apartment, he said that it was 202 Far East Apartment.

But a check with Far East Plaza’s residence showed that all its unit numbers are in four digits.

He could not arrange for a viewing of the apartment as he is doing a master’s programme in computer programming in London and has no friends in Singapore, he said.

He would send the keys only after the lease contract was signed and payment made.

“You have nothing to worry about, I’ll be sending you the contract and scanned passport of myself,” he said repeatedly.

When my paper asked him about forum postings about him being a scammer, he said: “No, I don’t do such things… People keep saying rubbish on the Internet.

It’s because I’m not gonna lease the room to them, that’s why they say I’m a scammer.”

He said that he was renting out the apartment on behalf of his mother, who owns it.

When told that he was speaking to my paper, he said “no problem”, but then hung up.

Scamwarners.com’s adviser, Mr David Jenson, 40, said one should never pay or send personal details to a stranger online.

Insist on seeing the title deeds, said Consumers Association of Singapore executive director Seah Seng Choon.

Check out the rightful owners of a property on the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore’s website, and look for properties via reputable websites like www.iproperty.com and www.propertyguru.com, said Mr Nelson Tan, a council member of the Institute of Estate Agents.

A police spokesman said tenants should request all parties to be present when signing tenancy documents, and should not pay large sums in cash.

Source: my paper, 12 May 2010