An Uber driver who exchanged blows with a traffic warden and used abusive words on him was yesterday jailed for a day and fined $2,000 – which became an additional two weeks’ jail when he did not pay the sum.

Goh Kok Ling, 60, pleaded guilty to fighting with Tan Hock Guan, 51, disturbing the public peace, and uttering a vulgarity in Hokkien at Tan at the Bugis Junction taxi stand in Victoria Street at about 7.15pm on Nov 27 last year. Tan had received a similar sentence in May this year.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Daphne Lim said Tan, then a Land Transport Authority traffic warden, was standing at the entrance of the taxi stand at Bugis Junction when he told Goh, who was driving a Toyota Corolla Altis car, not to enter as the taxi stand was only for taxis.

He indicated to Goh to proceed to the pick-up and drop-off point instead.

Unhappy, Goh told Tan to speak to his passenger, who wanted to be picked up from the taxi stand.

Tan took a photo of Goh’s car after his passenger boarded. Goh alighted, touched Tan on his shoulder from behind, and challenged him to issue a summons.

Tan told Goh not to lay hands on him, adding that he had recorded a video and that Goh could expect action to be taken against him.

Goh later leaned over to Tan and uttered the vulgarity. Tan retorted the same in Hokkien and punched Goh once in the stomach.

Goh retaliated and both traded punches. When Goh slipped and fell to the ground, Tan kicked him.

A passer-by broke up the fight. But the scuffle did not end there.

When Tan moved to the other side of the taxi stand, Goh followed and confronted him. Tan punched Goh. They fought again and were separated by the same passer-by.

Goh’s lawyer, assigned by the Criminal Legal Aid Scheme, Mr Benny Tan, said in mitigation that his client suffered significantly more serious injuries caused by Tan.

Mr Tan said Goh had to pay close to $20,000 in medical fees, in particular, to replace two teeth he lost as a result of the assault.

Goh could have been jailed for up to one year and/or fined up to $5,000 on each charge.

Man in LTA uniform seen beating a Uber driver

Click on thumbnail to view photos. Source: 

Facebook screengrabs

This article was first published on August 17, 2016.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.

Three years after she was brutally beaten up by a neighbour, Madam Toh Siew Hong, 67, still lives in fear. She is wary when leaving her home and hides whenever the doorbell rings.

She has lost some of her sense of smell and the pain in her back serves as a reminder of the assault.

Haunted by memories of the attack, she cannot fall asleep sometimes, and used to wake up in the middle of the night screaming.

On the morning of Sept 28, 2013, Madam Toh was on her way home after grocery shopping when her neighbour, Casey Sabrina Ng, 43, also known as Asha Verma, stopped her at the lift lobby outside her Chai Chee Road flat.

Madam Toh told The Straits Times that she had not noticed Ng approaching. Ng shouted at her before shoving her.

The elderly woman retaliated, only to be attacked for an agonising 18 minutes. She was dragged across the floor by her hair, stomped on her head repeatedly and had an aluminium incense burner flung at her.

“There were others watching from (Ng’s) house when she was beating me up. One of them had a knife in his hand.

“I grabbed on to Ng’s leg and told her: ‘If I die, all of you are doomed too,'” recalled Madam Toh, tears welling up in her eyes.

She moved out of Chai Chee for some time but moved back after Ng left. But the elderly woman said she still feels worried.

It was not the first time Ng had caused trouble for Madam Toh and her family.

Over about five months before the incident, they went to the police around five times because of Ng, said Madam Toh.

Madam Toh’s elder daughter, Ms Maddy Yap, 42, who works in human resource management, said Ng had moved into a unit on the same floor as her mother’s in early 2013.

Madam Toh’s troubles began when someone called the police in May that year to complain about loud noises from Ng’s unit.

“Every now and then, she would come and kick my mother’s door, asking her why she called the police,” said Ms Yap.

“We kept explaining to her that it was not us.”

She said this did not stop Ng from banging on Madam Toh’s door, smashing her flowerpots and hurling vulgarities in Hokkien.

Ng would sometimes be drunk and yell at passers-by, and chase Madam Toh when she was going home, Ms Yap said.

Each time her family called the police, Ng was said to have denied her deeds. “(Ng) told us that the police would never nab her,” said Madam Toh.

Ms Yap said: “Police would come and knock on (Ng’s) door, but each time they left, things got worse. It was endless… We felt helpless.”

Eventually, they installed a security camera outside their unit.

The day Madam Toh was attacked, her neighbour called the police, who arrested Ng. Madam Toh was hospitalised for 10 days.

Yesterday, Ng was sentenced to 5½ years of corrective training.

After her discharge from hospital, Madam Toh moved from her Chai Chee home of 16 years to live with other family members for more than a year.

“She brought us up single-handedly,” said Ms Yap, the oldest of three siblings.

“Watching your mother get beaten (on video) and being unable to help is torturous. You can never recover from that memory.”

Mr Pereira said that Ng (above) was not happy that he and her daughter were not together and that she had been aggressive towards him and his family. (Photo: The Straits Times)

Son-in-law, his family reported her to police

The 43-year-old woman who assaulted her Chai Chee neighbour also has a history of aggression towards her son-in-law and his family.

“(Ng) has been like that from the day I knew my wife… She’s a violent person,” Casey Sabrina Ng’s son-in-law, Mr Lester Pereira, told The Straits Times.

Mr Pereira, 27, and his sister, Lynneth, 23, made police reports against Ng last year after incidents at the Bukit Batok flat where they live with their uncle.

Besides “causing a nuisance”, Ng had tried to set fire to the entrance of their unit. She then threatened Ms Pereira with a chopper.

“She was not happy that my wife and I were not together at that point in time,” said Mr Pereira, who is going through a divorce with Ng’s daughter. Married for six years, the couple have a four-year-old daughter and a son who is turning two. His wife has another daughter, aged six, born out of wedlock.

Mr Pereira, who does contract jobs, first met Ng before marrying her daughter.

Ng had turned up at his uncle’s home, where her daughter was then living. Fresh out of jail, Ng had no place to stay and no money for food.

Mr Pereira’s aunt took her in and not long after, Ng started drinking and finding trouble with the family for no apparent reason, he alleged.

“I told my wife not to have her around. We couldn’t live happily at all,” he added. He was also told that Ng would enlist the help of others to beat him up, he said, adding that his mother-in-law did not like him.

Around 2013, his family lost contact with Ng for more than a year when she lived in Chai Chee with an older man she said was her uncle. But one day in 2014, Mr Pereira found her on his doorstep, drunk. When he asked why she was there, she broke down in tears – the older man had been injured. “She got frightened and ran away,” he said.

Later that day, he said he found her taking drugs to “cool off”.

“She drank and she took drugs in my house,” he said, adding that she also hit his children to provoke him.

While Ng did not like many people, he said, she was “okay” with her daughter. Each time Ng got into trouble with the law, her daughter would bail her out. At first, Mr Pereira helped as Ng had promised to change. But once she stepped out of the police station, she returned to her old ways, he said.

“I told my wife, please don’t bail her out. If she really has depression, she needs treatment.” He said Ng has a certificate saying she has depression. But his wife persisted.

“I don’t want anything to do with (Ng),” he said. “If she’s outside, she’ll hurt more and more people.”

This article was first published on August 17, 2016.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.

Madam Chung Khin Chun, described as a “particularly warm, friendly and trusting person”, lived modestly. But in the four years after Yang Yin moved into her Gerald Crescent bungalow to his arrest, her cash savings went from $2.7 million to just $10,000.

This was revealed yesterday when Yang, 42, pleaded guilty to misappropriating $1.1 million from the 89-year-old widow.

Since being accused by her niece of exerting an undue influence on the rich elderly woman, the former China tour guide has stuck to one narrative: that she saw him as the “grandson” she never had, and wanted him to move in and take care of her. That was why she wanted to leave her considerable assets to him.

Tussle over widow’s $40m assets turns ugly

Click on thumbnail to view photos. Source: 

The Straits Times, Madam Hedy Mok, Lianhe Wanbao, Madam Chang Phie Chin, Court Documents

Yesterday, the story was exposed as nothing more than a fiction. He came to Singapore simply to benefit himself and his family.

Throughout the saga, Yang claimed that Madam Chung needed his help at home.

But Immigration and Checkpoints Authority records showed that he was frequently away from Singapore. Between September 2009 and September 2014, he left Singapore on 43 occasions and was away for a total of 307 days.

He never took Madam Chung, who was diagnosed with dementia in April 2014, to see a doctor or a psychiatrist.

All household chores, including cleaning and cooking, were done by maids. Yang also ate breakfast alone as he woke at around 10am to 11am, far later than Madam Chung.

“The accused claimed that Madam Chung had accepted him as her ‘grandson’ on a Beijing trip in 2008, and addressed him as such. This is false,” said Deputy Public Prosecutor Sanjiv Vaswani in the statement of facts. “The accused also claimed that it was Madam Chung who had asked him to move to Singapore to live with her as her grandson. This is also false.”

It was in 2006 that Yang, then a tour guide, first met Madam Chung. During the visit to Singapore, he told Madam Chung’s friend, for whom he had organised a trip, that he was interested in art. She took him to the home of Madam Chung, an avid art collector.

The next meeting was in 2008, when Yang organised a Beijing trip for Madam Chung and her friend. During the trip, he started addressing the women as his grandmothers and urged them to call him “Xiao Yang” (“Little Yang”).

From then on, Yang would periodically call Madam Chung, who was at a vulnerable time in her life after her husband died in 2007. He told her he often visited Singapore and she said he could use a spare room in her house to save on hotel charges.

In February 2009, he stayed there for a month. During the time, he persuaded her to give him $40,000 by claiming he needed to buy a car in China to practise driving since he had just got his licence. In truth, he did not have a licence.

He also told her he wanted to quit his job and find one in Singapore. But it has since been proved that the most he did in this regard later was to set up a fake music and dance company.

In July 2009, Yang returned for a month and told Madam Chung he would help manage her finances. Soon, he realised the extent of her savings and investments.

In January 2010, he persuaded her to give him $500,000 to buy her a horse painting by artist Xu Beihong.

Tussle over widow’s $40m assets: A look at Madam Chung’s bungalow

Click on thumbnail to view photos. Source: 

The Straits Times, Raymond Tan

Yang now admits he had in fact purchased a $200 fake.

To avoid suspicion, the sum was moved from the widow’s bank account to his, then back to her account, before landing in his father’s account in China.

He also tried to conceal his misappropriation of $600,000 by lying to the police that he had used the sum to buy five paintings for her.

The five paintings were evaluated by an expert to be worth only $2,000 to $3,000 in total.

During the trial, Yang lied that Madam Chung had given him all of her monies. These included over $300,000 that she entrusted to him to purchase a condominium unit on her behalf; $70,000 she gave for insurance policies in his name but monies from which were meant to benefit her when the policies matured; and a further $600,000 she wanted him to invest.

These sums, including the proceeds from the sale of the condo unit, have been seized by the authorities.

In 2010, he also influenced Madam Chung to change her will – which left most of her money to charity – to one that benefited him. The will has since been revoked by the courts.

Yang is expected to be sentenced on Sept 9.

What he took and the lies he spun

MISAPPROPRIATION OF $500,000

Some time in or around January 2010, Yang Yin persuaded Madam Chung Khin Chun that he had a friend in China by the name of Zhu, who had a valuable painting titled Yin Ma Tu (or Horse Drinking Water) by renowned Chinese painter Xu Bei Hong.

He told her that Zhu was prepared to sell the painting for $500,000.

She issued a cheque to Yang but he realised that if he were to remit such a large sum overseas, red flags might be raised as he was unemployed. So he transferred back the money, and got her to remit the money to his father’s account in China.

The horse painting he did buy was a fake. On March 4, 2010, he returned to Singapore and showed the fake painting and a falsified receipt to Madam Chung.

LYING ON THE STAND

Yang later claimed during trial that the $500,000 had been a gift to him from Madam Chung for him to pay off his family debts. He also claimed that around $420,000 was used to pay off medical debts that his grandmother had incurred from a urinary tract condition.

But when queried, he claimed he no longer had the bills and that some of them would have been burned.

MISAPPROPRIATION OF $600,000

Yang was added as a joint account holder of Madam Chung’s OCBC investment account in late 2009. In 2011, he told the bank to redeem unit trusts the widow entrusted to him. Proceeds of nearly $1.3 million were added to his account.

On Jan 18, 2012, Yang withdrew $600,000 in cash from the account. He had called his personal banker at OCBC and asked for the sum to be given to him in $10,000 notes.

When asked about the withdrawal, Yang lied that he was intending to register a company with business partners in Hong Kong. He also claimed that he required cash to purchase paintings for the business.

Yang, in fact, had no intention whatsoever to set up a Hong Kong company.

To hide his wrongdoing, Yang procured two fake receipts, which purported to show that he had purchased five paintings for a total of $587,000.

LYING TO POLICE

After his arrest, he identified the five paintings he had “bought” for $600,000. Art expert Lim Sew Yong, however, testified that the five paintings were commonplace artworks and estimated the total value at $2,000 to $3,000.

This article was first published on MONTH DAY, 2016.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.

The gas leak at Tanjong Pagar MRT station on Monday afternoon was caused by an oil leak in a train’s air-conditioning compressor.

Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan told Parliament yesterday that the train was a first-generation model from Japanese manufacturer Kawasaki, with parts that are more than 20 years old.

The incident, he said, underscores the importance of maintenance – a call he has made previously in response to the regular train breakdowns over the past five years.

Likening older trains to an ageing human body, Mr Khaw said: “If you look after your body well from day one, when you are 40 years old… you probably can still maintain pretty good form.

“But still, a 40-year-old is not the same as a 14-year-old, and likewise, (it is) the same thing with trains.”

Mr Khaw said preliminary investigations suggested that the train’s air-con compressor had become overheated after the oil leaked.

‘Smoke’ fills MRT train and station

Click on thumbnail to view photos. Source: 

Stomp, The Straits Times

This resulted in freon gas being released from the air-con system to the platform area, which initially sparked fears of a fire.

Mr Khaw was responding to Mr Sitoh Yih Pin (Potong Pasir), who asked for an update on the leak.

Freon gas is a common refrigerant used in air-conditioners. It is non-toxic and not flammable.

Mr Khaw said engineers will examine the compressor to check what had caused the oil, which is sealed within it, to leak. It was last checked about 10 days ago.

Videos posted on social media showed commuters rushing out of what looked like a smoke-filled train.

Operator SMRT later said passengers left the train, and its staff switched on the tunnel ventilation system to disperse the gas. The train was later withdrawn from service.

The gas leak has nothing to do with the cracks that formed underneath the carriages of several newer Kawasaki trains manufactured in China, said Mr Khaw.

The leak is the latest air-con-related incident on the MRT network. Earlier this month, The Straits Times reported two cases of ice shards falling from the air-con vents of China-made trains plying the Circle Line.

Last month, there were also reports of water streaming down from the air-con vents of an East-West Line train.

This article was first published on Aug 17, 2016.
Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.