Singapore sentences British national to more than 6 years in Wirecard case
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Two businessmen were handed the longest prison sentences to date connected to the collapse of Wirecard, one of Europe’s biggest accounting frauds, by a Singapore judge on Tuesday.
James Henry O’Sullivan, a 51-year-old British national, and Shan Rajaratnam, a 59-year-old Singaporean, were found guilty in September of falsifying documents to trick auditor EY into thinking the German fintech start-up had hundreds of millions of euros in accounts.
O’Sullivan was given a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence while Rajaratnam was given a 10-year sentence. Lawyers for both men said they would appeal the sentences.
The two-year case is the highest-profile of several prosecutions in Singapore linked to Wirecard, which had an outpost in the city-state.
In June 2020, Wirecard disclosed that €1.9bn said to be in its accounts did not exist. The business subsequently collapsed.
O’Sullivan was a close confidant of Jan Marsalek, the company’s former chief operating officer who is one of Europe’s most wanted financial criminals, and ran a series of businesses in Asia with ties to Wirecard. He was accused of instructing Rajaratnam, a director of secretarial firm Citadelle Corporate Services, to falsify documents.
The charges related to paperwork sent by Rajaratnam between March 2016 and March 2018 that purported to show €150mn in cash overseen by Citadelle on behalf of Wirecard in Singaporean bank accounts.
In 2024, Rajaratnam’s brother, Thilagaratnam Rajaratnam, was given a four-week prison sentence and banned from being a company director for five years for failing to exercise diligence in his duties as a director.
Rajaratnam’s brother had been paid $500 a month to be the sole director and shareholder of a business owned by O’Sullivan. He admitted to signing seven letters to Wirecard’s auditors claiming amounts held in the company’s bank accounts, without checking whether the sums were there.
Several mid-level Wirecard executives have been imprisoned in Singapore over the past three years, following some of the first criminal convictions linked to the scandal.
James Wardhana, an Indonesian who was the international finance process manager of Wirecard Asia, was sentenced to 21 months and Chai Ai Lim, a Singaporean who was the head of finance at Wirecard Asia, was given a 10-month sentence in June 2023 for conspiring to misappropriate funds.
Another Singapore-based Wirecard executive, See Lee Wee was later given a 10-week jail term.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore has also fined several financial institutions for anti-money laundering breaches connected to Wirecard.
Markus Braun, Wirecard’s former chief executive, and two other senior managers are currently on trial in Germany, while Marsalek fled to Russia to avoid prosecution.
