No overnight queues for passes as trial resumes

THE high-profile City Harvest Church trial resumed yesterday, but not quite with a bang.

Interest in the court case seemed to have waned after it started in May last year, with no overnight queues this time for passes into the courtroom.

In fact, about 10 passes were left unwanted for both the morning and afternoon sessions, unlike the previous two tranches when the coveted passes were snapped up on opening day.

The only buzz yesterday was online, with memes of the stylish accused former church finance manager Serina Wee surfacing on social media within hours of her showing up at the Subordinate Courts.

Inside the courtroom, supporters continued to shower their church leaders with attention by giving them packets of grapes and nuts and chair pads for the dock.

Five of the six accused - church founder Kong Hee, Wee, church finance manager Sharon Tan, former secretary of the church's management board John Lam Leng Hung and founding member and deputy senior pastor Tan Ye Peng - stuck with each other and their lawyers during the breaks.

Former church investment manager Chew Eng Han, who had publicly quit the church in June last year, was the odd one out, again keeping to himself for most of the day.

The only witness to take the stand yesterday was Ms Tiang Yii for the prosecution. The partner at auditing firm Baker Tilly TFW had led the audit of City Harvest for the period January 2006 to June 2007. More crucially, she was in charge of auditing church- linked music production firm Xtron Productions for the period January to December 2007.

That August, Xtron had signed an agreement with the church's investment arm AMAC Capital Partners to borrow up to $13 million of church funds through the issue of Xtron bonds.

Xtron was managing Kong's wife Ho Yeow Sun's singing career at the time, and the prosecution believes the bonds were shams used to funnel church funds to finance Ms Ho's career.

Ms Tiang said she had not seen several e-mail in which several of the accused discussed concerns that Xtron could not repay the bond money in time.

If Xtron's financial viability was in question, it would have affected its audit as well as the City Harvest audit after the church bought the Xtron bonds, she said. She said that in signing off on the Xtron audit, she had instead relied on cash flow projections provided by Wee, who was then an accountant for the firm.

Asked earlier in the day about audits in general, she said that they were "inherently limited". "We can only rely on audit evidence that is available," she said, adding that fraud could be difficult to uncover if two entities colluded to falsify the paperwork.

Ms Tiang, however, also explained the rationale for changes she made in official audit-related documents made at the church's or Xtron's request.

For example, she had agreed to remove a reference in Xtron's audit report that showed that City Harvest had bought the firm's bonds, because the audit had shown there was no legal requirement to disclose the relationship.

She had initially also recommended the church make clearer to members that its building fund had been used to rent a temporary worship space at Singapore Expo. But she agreed to drop the idea after the church told her it had done so at a meeting.

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