KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian businessman John Soh Chee Wen, the mastermind of Singapore's biggest case of stock market manipulation that wiped out nearly S$8 billion in market value in October 2013, has been sentenced to 36 years in jail.
Soh was handed the sentence on Dec 28, while his co-conspirator Quah Su-Ling was sentenced to 20 years in jail, according to The Straits Times.
Both are appealing their sentences.
The court case spanned a record 349 successful charges in some 200 days of trial over nearly four years.
Prosecutors had sought a jail sentence of 40 years for Soh, and 19-and-a-half-years for Quah.
The pair were found to have manipulated the share prices of Blumont Group, Asiasons Capital and LionGold Corp - known collectively as BAL - between August 2012 and October 2013, through 187 trading accounts held with 20 financial institutions in the names of 58 individuals and companies.
Soh, 63, has been in remand since November 2016, while Quah, 58, the former chief executive of Singapore Exchange-listed IPCO International (now renamed Renaissance United), is out on bail of S$4 million.
Of the 180 charges on which Soh was convicted, prosecutors sought consecutive sentences for 11 charges (three of false trading, three deception charges, two cheating charges and three tampering charges) and an aggregate sentence of 40 years' jail.
For Quah, who was convicted on 169 charges, the prosecution sought consecutive sentences for six charges (two false trading charges, three deception charges and one cheating charge), and an aggregate sentence of 19-and-a-half-years' jail.
The prosecution did not propose any discount for Quah, "given the shorter aggregate sentence", The Straits Times reported.
Deputy public prosecutor Nicholas Tan in a November hearing likened the near S$8 billion loss in market capitalisation resulting from the penny stock crash to "the equivalent of wiping out the market capitalisation of 33 Pan-Electric Industries (Pan-El)".
The collapse of Pan-El in 1985 resulted in the closure of the Singapore and Malaysian stock exchanges for three days in order to contain the fallout on heavily leveraged stockbroking firms.