By Aqil Hamzah for The Straits Times
Copyright tnp
Businessman David Yong, of Netflix’s Super Rich In Korea fame, was fined $1,000 by the Law Society of Singapore council for holding an executive appointment in a business entity.
A notice published in the Government Gazette on the evening of Sept 19 said Yong, whose full name is Yong Khung Lin, had breached rules regulating the legal profession.
As director and chief executive of the Evergreen Group of Companies, he had flouted a requirement in the Legal Profession (Professional Conduct) Rules 2015, which state that “a legal practitioner must not accept any executive appointment in a business entity”.
The 38-year-old was a partner at Yong, Seow & Lim Legal in Singapore as of April 2024, but had been removed as of mid-August 2024, according to an archived version of the law firm’s website.
The website was under maintenance as at Sept 21, and the last archived version that could be accessed was from March.
Yong, who is currently in Japan after a district court granted him permission to travel, was charged in 2024 with four counts of falsification of accounts.
He was handed a fifth charge on June 3, after being accused of consenting to the offering of promissory notes by Evergreen GRP Holdings between July 2023 and July 2024.
These promissory notes, which are written and signed unconditional promises made by a borrower to pay a certain sum of money to a specified person or company, did not comply with requirements under the Securities and Futures Act.
The police said in a statement then that more than $61 million was raised from the issuance of over 1,000 promissory notes that promised an annual interest of 10 per cent.
After appearing in the Netflix series Super Rich In Korea in May 2024, in which he claimed to be “Singapore’s top 1 per cent super rich”, Yong was arrested three months later, and then charged in court two days following his arrest.
He had been given permission to fly to Japan from Sept 12 to 22, and then to Shanghai from Sept 22 to 25 for business reasons, and his next pre-trial conference will take place on Oct 17.
