Sentence reduced for casino cheat after appeal
TODAY file photo
SINGAPORE — A team leader from a Russian syndicate, who cheated the two casinos here of more than S$105,000 with two men, had his jail sentence reduced from 45 to 38 months, after an appeal was heard at the High Court on Friday (Jan 19).
In reconsidering the punishment, the judge also set out sentencing guidelines owing to the novelty of the offence.
Vladislav Logachev, 42, and two other men had used smartphones to record the playing patterns of slot machines made by certain manufacturers. Then, using high-tech tools on laptops, they predicted when high payouts were made.
Logachevo pleaded guilty to 16 charges when he was sentenced in April last year. He and two accomplices, Radoslav Skubnik, a Czech, and Andrei Egorov, a Russian, had committed the offences in the casinos at Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa.
At Friday’s court hearing, the two charges highlighted for the purposes of sentencing are over the two sessions where Logachev and his team received the highest winnings, which took place on May 7, 2016.
Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon said that when the district judge sentenced Logachev to 45 months’ jail last year — 24 months for cheating about S$31,000 by himself, and 21 months for cheating some S$22,000 with an accomplice — it was “almost double” the sentence for his biggest offence.
The original sentence “offends” a sentencing principle, called the totality principle, which stipulates that the judge may be required to make further adjustments to sentences for individual charges, to ensure that the aggregate sentence is not excessive.
Having said that, such adjustments should be modest because Logachev “doubtlessly committed serious offences which must be met with a correspondingly substantial custodial term”, he added.
Logachev’s sentence, which he has to serve consecutively for the two charges, was amended to 38 months by Chief Justice Menon, who reduced the sentence for the first charge from 24 to 20 months, and the second from 21 to 18 months.
The reduced sentence is backdated to May 10 in 2016, as ordered by the district judge previously.
While the public prosecutor had argued earlier that the sentence imposed by the district judge was “not manifestly excessive”, the Chief Justice said that the appeal was “not one that could be disposed of merely by looking at the sentences imposed in the available sentencing precedents”.
Rather, the court considered it necessary to approach the matter “from first principles”, and to consider where the case stood along the sentencing continuum provided for under the Casino Control Act.
Court documents described Logachev as part of a Russian syndicate that operated in casinos in the United States, Europe and Macau.
The syndicate would form teams to hone in on selected slot machines to observe and analyse the play patterns, enabling them to win between 60 and 65 per cent of the time.
Each team is facilitated by a “master”, a leader who would upload the phone-recorded information to a server for analysis, and alert their members in the casinos whenever the “next mass payout” is going to take place.
Logachev was one such team leader who came to Singapore with two accomplices on May 5 in 2016 to execute the scheme, and they won more than S$105,000 in six sessions over four days. They had agreed that Logachev would take about 15 to 20 per cent of the winnings, and his accomplices would get 10 per cent each, with the syndicate taking the rest.
His accomplice Egorov, then 33, cheated S$55,000 in total and was sentenced to 30 months’ jail in April last year. Skubnik, then 40, cheated almost S$20,000 and was sentenced to 22 months’ jail in June 2016.
