37-year-old Chinese national Yu Huajie pleaded guilty to 2 charges under the Employment of Foreign Manpower Act and was sentenced to 7 weeks imprisonment on 26 October.
He had given false information and included a fake certificate that he paid $14,000 for, in his Employment Pass application.
What happened?
Yu made inquiries on how he could settle down in Singapore and approached a man who told him that he could get an Employment Pass if he invested $1 million in a company in Singapore.
Yu believed that an Employment Pass would help him to get Permanent Resident status here.
He then transferred the money to the man, and also submitted his passport and biodata, to the man and the director of Hai Sin International, Ms Wang Jue, who purportedly helps people invest or start a business in Singapore.
Yu knew that his EP would be applied under a company called Gashubin engineering, and his investment would be for them.
He was also aware that his monthly salary of $10,000 per month would be paid on top of any future potential investment returns and he wouldn’t have to work for Gashubin.
He was then told that he needed to submit a degree certificate for his EP, and he then paid US$10,000 ($SG$14,000) for a fake certificate that showed that he had graduated from the Chubb Institute (Westbury) in the US, with a bachelor’s degree in Business Management.
He applied for his EP on 14 December 2018 and falsely declared on 15 February 2019 to MOM that he would be working for Gashubin Engineering, and that he was a business management graduate.
MOM then approved his application for an EP.
Yu received his “salary” of $5,000 to $10,000 while he was in Singapore from 15 February 2019 to 16 March 2021 but he was never their employee.
An employment inspector then carried out investigations on 16 March after receiving information about law-breaking related to foreign employment.
Investigations later showed that from early to mid-2018, Ms wang had told the director of Gashubin that she could secure foreign investors for their company if it applied for EPs for them to stay in Singapore.
Wang then agreed with the director that the foreigners would only invest financially in Gashubin and would not be working for them.