Former oil tycoon Lim Oon Kuin (pic) will be sentenced on Nov 18 for cheating and forgery in a trading scandal that will go into the history books as one of the biggest in the global energy-trading hub.
In a Singapore court yesterday, public prosecutor Christopher Ong argued for a 20-year jail sentence for Lim on three counts including instigating forgery and deceiving HSBC Holdings Plc.
Lim’s defence lawyers led by Davinder Singh sought a seven-year period.
The 82-year-old known as OK Lim arrived in court in a wheelchair.
The sentence is the latest development in the dramatic downfall of Lim, founder of now-defunct oil company Hin Leong Trading Pte. Lim filed for bankruptcy this week after agreeing to pay US$3.59bil (RM15.4bil) to the liquidators and creditor HSBC to resolve multi-year civil lawsuits against him and his family.
In 2020, Bloomberg News was the first to report that at least two lenders had frozen credit lines to Hin Leong, citing concerns over the company’s ability to repay its debts.
In the months that followed, it emerged that Lim had hidden hundreds of millions in losses speculating in oil futures and sold inventories that were pledged as collateral for loans.
Lim, better known as OK Lim, founded Hin Leong in 1973 as an oil distributor with one truck. — Bloomberg
