Singapore's de facto central bank and regulator also handed a two-year ban to the founder of NRA Capital.

Singapore has slapped a former BSI wealth manager who is currently behind bars with a lifetime ban from financial services over his role in a scandal at a Malaysian state-owned investment fund. 

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) handed Yeo Jiawei a lifetime prohibition order and Kevin Scully, former chief executive of NRA Capital, a three-year ban, it said in an online statement yesterday. 

The regulator has now issued prohibition orders against eight people in total over their involvement in an alleged global money laundering scandal at 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB, the fund which authorities worldwide have claimed billions of dollars were siphoned from and washed through Asian banks. 

In July, a Singapore court sentenced Yeo to 54 months in jail for money laundering and cheating, while eight other charges were also taken into consideration. The sentence was to run concurrently with the remainder of an earlier 30-month jail sentence he was handed last December for witness tampering. 

Now, the MAS has banned him from providing any capital markets and financial advisory services, and from managing, acting as a director of, or becoming a substantial shareholder of firms providing such services.

Scully, who founded licensed financial advisor NRA Capital, had been appointed to value PetroSaudi Oil Services, an oil company founded by a Suadi prince which has felt the wrath of US authorities amid allegations that $1 billion of Malaysian public money for a join venture with 1MDB was instead siphoned off to a native businessman. 

The MAS found that Scully had failed to ensure that NRA’s valuation of the firm “was carried out with sufficient care, judgement and objectivity,” it said. 

As a result, the regulator imposed the same conditions on Scully as Yeo, but only for a two-year period, “following careful consideration of [his] written representations and the relevant facts,” the MAS said.