Ex-Shell employee, co-conspirator in S$100 million fuel heist, gets 21 years' jail

A former Shell employee was sentenced to 21 years' jail on Mar. 30 for his role in a long-running scheme to misappropriate fuel from the company's Pulau Bukom facility, in which syndicate members siphoned S$100 million worth of marine gas oil.

Richard Goh Chee Keong, 56, pleaded guilty to 24 charges, including criminal breach of trust, money laundering, corruption and drug consumption, The Straits Times (ST) reported.

Another 26 charges were taken into consideration during sentencing.

The Malaysian national and Singapore Permanent Resident admitted to receiving at least S$1.5 million in criminal benefits, which he spent on property, investments and at least two cars.

Assets worth S$1.07 million seized from him will be forfeited as compensation to Shell.

The judge granted his request to defer his sentence and ordered Goh to surrender at the State Courts on Apr. 20.

The case

According to court documents seen by Mothership, Goh started working at Shell's Pulau Bukom facility in 1993 as a technician.

At the time of the offences, he was an assistant production team leader and a shore loading officer.

He was recruited by Abdul Latif Ibrahim, one of two masterminds behind the scheme.

Latif had lured Goh by exploiting his financial difficulties, telling him the arrangement was "good money".

Once on board, Goh recruited other team members, planned illegal fuel transfers onto vessels, and bribed independent surveyors to falsify ullage reports and overlook the illicit activity.

The syndicate employed sophisticated methods to avoid detection, routing gas oil through pipelines that bypassed meters, running multiple pumps simultaneously to mask the outflows, and temporarily tampering with meters where they could not be avoided.

The illegal loadings began with the brokering of a deal to sell misappropriated fuel to vessels.

Parallel operations

The scheme traced its origins to 2007, when Latif and the other mastermind, Juandi Pungot, began misappropriating fuel while working on the same team.

Following a falling-out in early 2013, the two men went on to run separate but parallel illegal operations until their arrests in 2018.

In early 2015, Shell began observing significant unidentified oil loss at Pulau Bukom and eventually lodged a police report in August 2017.

According to ST, Juandi was sentenced to 29 years' jail in 2022 after his team siphoned S$127 million worth of fuel — more than 203,000 tonnes — from the facility.

On the other hand, Latif was sentenced in July 2025 to 25 years and two months’ jail after he admitted to leading a group of rogue employees to siphon S$100 million worth of marine gas oil — over 153,000 tonnes — between August 2014 and January 2018.

Eleven other former Shell employees have since been sentenced to jail terms ranging from one year and four months to 29 years.

In court, the prosecution had sought a sentence of between 21 and 22-and-a-half years for Goh, noting his culpability was slightly below that of Latif but comparable to two key members of Juandi's team, who received sentences of 23-and-a-half and 26-and-a-half years' jail respectively.

Goh's defence lawyer said his client had intended to plead guilty since 2018, but that investigations took time to complete.

Goh has since sold his home and is living with his former wife.

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