It has now been three weeks since Richard Yong disappeared into the abysmal refuge of exile shared by fugitives from the law. He left Singapore in the still of the night just hours after being made a bankrupt on May 16, for failing to settle preliminary claims of some $1 million.

The news, which took two weeks to reach the public domain, has shocked Singaporeans. How could the man who was to "bear the brunt" of the National Kidney Foundation's (NKF) multi-million dollar claim after a trial of grand proportions, escape his debt so easily?

More fundamentally, how could such a high-profile bankrupt exit the country without being noticed?

The irony of it is that a Mareva injunction preventing Yong from dissipating his assets had been obtained against Yong five days before he absconded.

It appears that the application for a Mareva injunction by the NKF's lawyers was prompted by the discovery that Yong had, since February when he admitted liability for damages in the NKF's civil suit, cashed in on his three private properties worth some $7.5 million — a strong hint of plans to leave the jurisdiction. So, at least at that point, he was a known flight risk.

One question that has arisen is how Yong managed to get past the immigration authorities despite being a bankrupt and, therefore, not allowed to leave the country except with the permission of the Official Assignee (OA).

The answer that has surfaced is that he had already absconded by the time the NKF's lawyers informed the OA that Yong had been made a bankrupt.

Is this a weakness in the system, one wonders. Does the OA rely on lawyers to inform them when a person has been made bankrupt? And then, does the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority rely on the OA to instruct them to blacklist bankrupts? Are these all unnecessary bottlenecks in the flow of information?

It would be more efficient if all relevant government agencies could be automatically notified of a bankruptcy order the moment it is made by the court.

It was reported recently that the public sector will be spending up to $1.5 billion on a new computer system called SOE (Standard Operating Environment) to be used across the entire civil service by 2010. With a common platform, such instantaneous communication between agencies and the courts could become the norm.

From the perspective of the NKF and of the donating public, the bigger issue is whether the charity has been deprived of the opportunity to recover its lost millions. After all, the prime objective of the NKF's civil claims was not to punish but to recover lost funds.

So, did Richard Yong manage to escape with his pockets full of assets which the NKF might have seized?

It was reported that following his flight from Singapore, he had sent the NKF notarised papers certifying he had $247 in his bank accounts; and that the proceeds of the property sales had gone to settle bank loans.

Since the NKF had already obtained a Mareva injunction against Mr Yong about a week before he absconded, one wonders what steps had been taken to enforce this and whether any assets were secured.

One could also ask whether the Mareva injunction could have been obtained much earlier — was there a reason for the delay?

And then there is the time lag in the release of information into the public domain — was there a reason for this?

As for the way forward, it may assuage the public's concerns to know the extent to which the NKF will still be able to satisfy the judgment by recourse against the other three directors who have admitted liability.

Hopefully, much more information will be forthcoming from the relevant persons so that some of these questions can be answered.

If mistakes were made, then acknowledging them will be the first step on the road to setting things right and preventing a recurrence.

The writer is a legal academic. This is his personal opinion.


- TODAY/so