Man gets 34 months’ jail for helping match-fixer flee S’pore
SINGAPORE — He had not only helped Wilson Raj Perumal flee Singapore on a passport issued under his particulars instead of the latter’s. To ensure the match-fixer could evade arrest, he had also aided him in obtaining a second Singapore biometric passport.
For that, Raja Morgan Chelliah, 36, was yesterday sentenced to 34 months in prison for three offences — falsifying information in a passport application, selling a Singapore passport and harbouring Wilson Raj from being apprehended.
Delivering his sentence in court, District Judge Adam Nakhoda said one aggravating factor was that Raja Morgan had profited from the sale of the passport. He had sold the passport for S$5,000 to an unknown person under Wilson Raj’s instructions and pocketed S$3,000 along the way.
Worst of all, he had provided the match-fixer with “a means to remain outside Singapore indefinitely”.
Wilson Raj, who claims to have made millions by fixing hundreds of football matches worldwide, absconded from Singapore in 2010 while out on bail in an assault case, using a passport issued under Raja Morgan’s particulars.
For that, Raja Morgan was jailed for a year in 2011. However, during investigations in February that year, he withheld the fact that he had helped Wilson Raj obtain a second passport a month earlier.
The second passport bore the photograph of Wilson Raj, but the details of another accomplice Subramaniam Sellapah. With the second passport, Wilson Raj was able to go to Finland, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland and South Africa. He was arrested in Finland in April 2011 and served two years in jail after being convicted of bribery, forgery and illegal border crossing. He moved to Budapest as a protected witness after his release.
In the mitigation plea, lawyer Surian Sidambaram, representing Raja Morgan, said his client had no knowledge that Wilson Raj was part of an international syndicate, and knew the match-fixer only as a wealthy and successful businessman.
The judge said: “It is disingenuous to claim that (the accused) did not know of (the seriousness of his offence). To compound matters, (Raja Morgan) procured a second passport when Wilson Raj had a warrant of arrest.”
The judge added that Raja Morgan was “an integral part of the entire scheme”. “General deterrence is the foremost sentencing principle for passport-related offences,” he said.
