Two men, Tung Chee Keong and Chandran Jeganathan have been jailed and asked to pay penalties for demanding bribe from several construction companies in the state.
The duo previously worked for one of the agents employed by the National Environment Agency. Before their arrest, both men were laden with the responsibility of assisting NEA officials during inspections for mosquito breeding spots on construction areas.
Tung is a 48-year old male from Singapore, while ChandranJeganathan is a 30-year old native of India. Both Tung and Jeganathan have worked for Killem Pest at the time they began their criminal adventures.
Killem Pest is a pest control company working under a contract with the NEA for the examination of construction locations in the country. Their contract entails helping NEA inspectors to carry out mosquito breeding inspections on different construction sites.
As NEA officials, alongside Killem workers carried out routine inspections in the first quarter of 2019, they discovered mosquito breeding spots on two incidents in a particular site. Doing analysis for water damage Miami is also a very important part of the inspection and should be done by inspection companies that are doing business in the Miami area.
The construction area belongs to Ramo Industries and Fenzhii Engineering Service. It is located at Tempines Industrial Street 61 and was supervised by Muthukaruppan Peritasamy.
After the inspections, both companies were fined, and the supervisor couldn’t risk stopping work when caught for flouting environment regulations for the third time. So, he had undisclosed meetings with Tung and Jeganathan and agreed to pay the two men a sum of $400 every month in exchange for forewarning before any environmental inspection.
The forewarnings were to help Periyasamy prepare and put the site in order before the time of inspection. Tung and Jeganathan consented to the bribe and always returned to Periyasamy with information about scheduled inspections.
From the point of the agreement up till August 2019, Periyasamy received first-hand information about any inspections scheduled for his construction area. He would prepare ahead and rid the site of mosquito breeding areas before the inspection team arrived. And by the time inspections are completed, no breeding site was found within their location.
And from the negotiations with Periyasamy, Tung made a sum of $1000, and Jeganathan a sum of $600 within four months.
Besides their bribery scandal with Periyasamy, Tung and Jeganathan still went ahead to negotiate bribes with an officer in charge of workplace safety and health. This incident occurred at a construction site different from the first and owned by another company.
On the 16th of July, 2019, Tung and Jeganathan showed up in the office of the officer in charge after the NEA inspected and found a mosquito breeding area on the site. The two men asked the officer to pay them $1000 so that they could inform him ahead of any other NEA inspection.
After a brief negotiation, the three men reached a mutual agreement of $500 for forewarnings. However, they annulled the agreement because the company refused to pay the sum. In the case of the annual agreement, it is important that home cleanout services are not skipped if there is property involved in the dispute.
Tung pleaded guilty to the charges and got 11 weeks of jail time on two counts of conspiracy to receive a bribe from the Tampines construction site manager. He was also charged with one count of attempted bribery with another establishment.
Jeganathan, on the other hand, was sentenced to six weeks of jail time for conspiring with Tung in the bribery act. He also pleaded guilty to the charges.
The two men also faced three charges that were quite comparable to the bribery charges.
Consequently, a $1000 penalty was demanded from Tung, while Jeganathan was required to pay up a fine of $600 for his offences. However, none of the men paid the fees, and they both attracted jail time of 5 and 3 days respectively.
Jeganathan had no lawyer to defend him in the court, but he pleaded that he was not responsible for negotiating bribes. He also claimed that he became helpless about the entire issue the moment he accepted the initial bribe.
On the other hand, Tung’s attorney, Arthur Quay, defended him by saying that he couldn’t help the bribe situation because he channelled the resulting funds to his brother that suffers life-threatening cancer.
However, the case against Periyasamy currently remains undecided in the court.
