Disgraced lawyer struck off rolls for doctoring grades to land job
The Court of Appeal heard the application by the Law Society of Singapore to have Jaya Anil Kumar disbarred and said that "any law student or young law graduate would know that forgery of documents is dishonesty and is a crime".
SINGAPORE — One year after she was fined S$10,000 for doctoring her grades in her degree transcript, disgraced lawyer Jaya Anil Kumar was struck off the rolls on Tuesday (Jan 22).
The 30-year-old graduated with a second class (lower) honours degree from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2011 and was called to the Singapore Bar in July 2012.
On Tuesday, the Court of Appeal heard the application by the Law Society of Singapore to have Jaya disbarred.
In its oral grounds of decision, the Court of Three Judges who presided over the hearing — Judge of Appeal Tay Yong Kwang and High Court judges Quentin Loh and Belinda Ang — said that Jaya’s conduct showed a "consistent trend of resorting to dishonest means to try to get what she wants as a career".
Her lawyer appealed for "a longer suspension" instead of striking her off the roll, on account of her youth and inexperience.
However, the court dismissed the argument, saying that "any law student or young law graduate would know that forgery of documents is dishonesty and is a crime".
The court heard that Jaya committed her first offence in 2013 when she applied for a job with the Legal Service Commission using her law degree transcript that she had doctored with a software on her computer.
Three years later, she repeated the trick and forged her results further for 18 modules such that she appeared to hold a second class (upper) honours degree from NUS, instead of the second class (lower) honours degree that she really has.
"Ms Jaya Anil Kumar may have been inexperienced in January 2013, but we are looking at deliberate criminal acts here, not incompetence or error of judgment," the court said.
Jaya was also not upfront and tried to avoid detection when her dishonest deeds were discovered, the court said, labelling her acts as "persistent criminal conduct".
"We are sad that we have to come to this conclusion, but we are constrained by the facts and the criminal acts which have been acknowledged to be grave and indefensible,” the court added.
However, the judges said that Jaya was not irredeemable and advised her to reorder her life and be truly repentant to make a good case of reinstatement to the Bar.
Jaya was fined on Jan 18 last year, and the Law Society thereafter applied for her to be dealt with under the Legal Profession Act.
Besides her disbarment, she will also have to pay S$5,000 to the Law Society for the costs and disbursements of the application.
