Hing Seng Shen

On the court record

Hing Seng Shen appears in the corpus in appellate criminal defence in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan), appearing for the appellant in a group of related appeals that arose from a single white-collar prosecution and were heard together. The appeals were against conviction and sentence on charges that combined Penal Code offences with an offence under anti-money-laundering legislation: criminal breach of trust under section 405 of the Penal Code, dishonest misappropriation of property under section 403, a charge of abetment, and an offence under section 4(1)(b) of the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act 2001. The argument on appeal fastened on the legal foundations of the conviction rather than on any single contest of fact. It asked whether the trial judge had erred in failing to hold that no offence was made out on the charges even if the whole of the prosecution evidence were taken as unrebutted or unexplained; whether the judge had erred in failing to assess the credibility of the main prosecution witnesses; and whether the judge had failed to take into consideration and appreciate the ingredients and requirements of section 405 of the Penal Code, and so failed to conclude that the elements of criminal breach of trust were not established. Because the appeals flowed from one set of charges and were argued together, they constitute a single sustained appellate challenge that placed the statutory definition of criminal breach of trust, and the proper evaluation of witness credibility, at the centre of the case. Across the appearances the practice is that of defence counsel operating at the appellate tier in a significant criminal breach of trust and money-laundering matter, where the correct identification of the elements of the offences is decisive, and where a successful attack on the predicate offences would carry consequences for the money-laundering charge built upon them.