Failed appeal leaves penny stock crash masterminds John Soh and Quah Su-Ling with long jail terms

The Court of Appeal upheld a lower court’s sentences on March 18 and dismissed appeals by John Soh Chee Wen and Quah Su-Ling, co-conspirators behind Singapore’s 2013 penny stock crash, to reduce their jail terms of 36 years and 20 years respectively.

The court found that the sentences handed down by High Court Judge Hoo Sheau Peng were reasonable, in line with precedents from previous cases and not manifestly excessive.

In meting out the longest custodial sentence for market manipulation in Singapore’s history, the High Court took into account scale and sophistication, as well as the severity of the harm caused by a scheme that wiped out almost $8 billion in stock market value in October 2013.

In December 2022, after a trial that lasted nearly 200 days over four years, Soh, 66, and Quah, 62, were convicted of a record 349 successful charges in total, including false trading, price manipulation, deception and cheating. Soh also received eight charges over witness tampering.

The duo lost their appeal in October 2025 to overturn their convictions over manipulating shares of Blumont Group, Asiasons Capital and LionGold – collectively referred to as BAL – between August 2012 and October 2013. They orchestrated trades through 187 accounts across 20 financial institutions, many of which were misled into extending financing for the scheme.

Delivering the judgment on March 18, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon rejected Soh’s arguments that the October 2013 crash was caused by factors beyond his control, and that he should not be held responsible for the alleged wrongdoing of a group of individuals who had acted beyond Soh and Quah’s control.

These individuals – known as the Manhattan House Group – included Mr Dick Gwee, Mr Ken Tai, Mr Henry Tjoa and Mr Gabriel Gan, who actively traded the three stocks from a rented office in Manhattan House in Chin Swee Road.

Instead, the Court of Appeal upheld the lower court’s findings that “Soh was certainly aware of the trading activities of the Manhattan House Group, and saw this as a necessary consequence of the need to keep the scheme going”.

Soh “had grander aspirations, in that he hoped, over the longer term, to inflate the liquidity and value of BAL shares to a point where the profits could be used to finance other corporate deals he envisaged”.

“In short, the scheme was an endeavour to subvert the very purpose for which the Securities and Futures Act was introduced, to regulate market activities and to ensure transparent dealing... In doing so, he had also severely harmed Singapore’s reputation as a financial hub,” the court found.

The court, also presided over by Justice Tay Yong Kwang and Senior Judge Andrew Phang, found “no reason to reduce” Quah’s sentence of 20 years, noting that she had “abused her position” as former chief executive of Singapore-listed IPCO International.

Quah argued that she was less culpable because she was allegedly Soh’s “girl Friday assistant”, or someone who simply followed instructions and did not play a key role in the conspiracy.

“But there is a limit that (Quah) can take this argument, (especially since) she elected not to give evidence during the trial,” the court said.

“There was therefore little, if any, evidence available to the judge to make any finding on the extent to which Quah’s culpability should be found to have been diminished.”

Quah, who began serving her 20-year sentence on Oct 17, 2025, and Soh, who has been in remand since Nov 25, 2016, arrived in court handcuffed and dressed in purple prison jumpsuits.

At least nine of Quah’s relatives and friends, including classmates from Malaysia, were in the public gallery, and they were allowed by the court to speak to her before she was taken away by prison guards.

Her aunt, Madam A. Quah, told The Straits Times that family members were disappointed as they had “expected at least two to five years’ reduction in her sentence”.

“She told us she’s okay and not to worry about her, and that she will be strong,” Madam Quah, 77, said.

Separately, Quah’s lawyer N. Sivananthan was hit with a personal costs order of $10,000 payable to the prosecution for “improper conduct” on his part during earlier appeal proceedings.

This included alleging that the trial judge was biased against his client, had shown “excessive interference” in the trial, and had inferred guilt on Quah after finding Soh guilty of witness tampering.

The court found that Mr Sivananthan had “acted improperly, not only in repeatedly casting spurious allegations of bias against the judge, but also in his subsequent repeated attempts to downplay the severity of these allegations”.

In ordering costs against Mr Sivananthan, the court found “allegations of judicial bias are extremely serious because they can be weaponised by disgruntled litigants to cast baseless aspersions against judges and waste valuable court time and resources in the process”.

While Mr Sivananthan has apologised and tendered a formal apology to the court, Chief Justice Menon found that this “does not absolve him of his misconduct”.

However, he has “expunged some of its sting through his apology for, and retraction of, his ill-founded allegations against the judge before us in open court”, the Chief Justice added.

“Subject to his compliance with the costs order and his remaining true to the retractions and apologies, we think the matter can be laid to rest there,” the court said.

Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.

Soh Chee Wen v Public Prosecutor and another appeal [2026] SGCA 13

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