NG YU ZHI v PUBLIC PROSECUTOR

Facts

Ng Yu Zhi was the director of Envy Asset Management Pte Ltd and Envy Global Trading Pte Ltd, which ran a scheme in which investors were to share profits from buying nickel from an Australian mining site at a discount and selling it forward. The scheme collapsed in 2021; interim judicial managers found investors had put in about $841,522,577. The Prosecution's case is that the nickel trades never existed; he says the problem was a temporary liquidity shortfall. He faced 105 charges, including fraudulent trading, cheating, forgery, criminal breach of trust and moving benefits of crime out of Singapore, and trial on 42 of them began on 26 November 2024.

He was released on bail, eventually set at $6m, but was re-arrested on 29 January 2024 over alleged attempts to sell a Bussorah Street shophouse, held in his wife's name and subject to a disposal prohibition, in a way that would divert $500,000 to him. Three fresh charges followed and the District Court revoked bail on 7 February 2024. After the Prosecution closed its case, he applied in Criminal Motion 25 of 2025 under s 97(1)(a) of the Criminal Procedure Code 2010 for bail from the trial judge.

Issues

1. Whether there were reasonable grounds to believe the accused would abscond if released on bail.
2. Whether the accused had funded the bail posted by his father-in-law, weakening the pull of bail.
3. Whether alleged offending while on bail, and any difficulties in preparing his defence from remand, affected whether bail should be granted.

Holding

The High Court dismissed the bail application, holding that whether it applied the revisionary standard of serious injustice or exercised a first-instance discretion, the balance came down in favour of refusing bail.

Reasoning

As some charges were non-bailable, the burden was on the accused to show why bail should be offered, balancing his liberty against the State's interest in his attendance, per Public Prosecutor v Yang Yin [2015] 2 SLR 78. The court found real flight risk. He had borrowed US$35,000, said to be for a forged passport, and his phone held an image of forged Slovenian identity documents bearing his photograph, which he did not satisfactorily explain. His own 2022 affidavit listed assets of $107,491,000 gifted to parties in China, of which CAD said $52.9m was unaccounted for, and CAD said he admitted moving $30.1m overseas through hawala transactions. With the Prosecution's case closed, the strength of the evidence and the seriousness of the charges also weighed against bail, while the presumption of innocence remained.

CAD's evidence of sham loan agreements and cash deposits, and the father-in-law's own statement, showed a very strong likelihood that the accused had funded that surety's $1.5m, diluting the pull of bail.

The court made no conclusive finding on the fresh charges, but noted the accused admitted procuring an imposter to sign the option to purchase, and found that a no-offending condition had not deterred him before. His complaints about remand conditions were largely contradicted by Prison Service evidence or too vague, and did not show his defence was impeded.

From the judgment