SINGAPORE: Former oil tycoon Lim Oon Kuin, better known as OK Lim, and his two children have been declared bankrupt, according to the government gazette on Friday (Dec 27).
The 82-year-old Lim and his two children, Lim Huey Ching and Evan Lim Chee Meng, consented in September to a judgment of US$3.5 billion (S$4.7 billion) being entered against them.
They said then that they did not have enough assets to pay all their claimants and would file for bankruptcy.
The bankruptcy order was made effective on Dec 19 and published in the government gazette on Friday.
They will have their bankruptcy estates managed by trustees Leow Quek Shiong and Seah Roh Lin of BDO Advisory.
The decision to consent to the judgment came in the midst of a civil trial that opened in August 2023 and was brought by liquidators against the Lim family.
Lim and his two children were expected to testify in the trial, but the consent judgment supersedes that and brought trial proceedings to a close.
A consent judgment is made with the consent of all involved parties and is meant to be the formal result of a case and an expression of an agreement.
Hin Leong had suffered about US$808 million in losses from futures and swaps from 2010 to 2020, with the losses allegedly concealed by overstating profits by US$2.1 billion in the same period.
The family had deliberately concealed Hin Leong’s losses and portrayed the company as profitable when it was, in fact, “massively insolvent”.
The figure of US$3.5 billion is the same figure Hin Leong, which is in compulsory liquidation, had sought the Lims to pay, and was the full amount of the company’s unsecured debts as of April 2020.
Lim was convicted in May this year in a separate criminal trial for cheating and abetting forgery.
He was sentenced last month to 17-and-a-half years in jail after orchestrating one of the most serious cases of trade financing fraud in Singapore.
His lawyer said then that Lim would appeal against the sentence.
