Singapore authorities added three further fraud charges against the director of a local accounting firm in a case linked to disgraced German payments company Wirecard AG.
R. Shanmugaratnam, a director of Citadelle Corporate Services Pte, was charged with three counts of falsifying letters from Citadelle erroneously representing that the Singapore accounting firm held certain amounts of cash in escrow accounts.
The additional allegations concern 377.5 million euros ($458 million) in total, according to charge sheets seen by Bloomberg News, and bring the total number of charges to 14. Taken together the charges involve about 1.2 billion euros in cash, according to calculations, more than half of the amount missing from the firm, though they cover different time periods.
Shanmugaratnam is the first person to be indicted in the city-state over the spectacular collapse of Wirecard, which has reverberated across the world.
Wirecard filed for bankruptcy in June after acknowledging that 1.9 billion euros it had listed as assets didn’t exist, triggering a global investigation. Singapore is home to Wirecard’s Asia-Pacific headquarters and the company had been expanding aggressively in the region, which accounted for almost 45% of the group’s reported revenue in 2018, second only to Europe. — Bloomberg
