S’pore Lawyer Who Beat Staff Charged For Assaulting & Threatening His Employees

Lawyers seem to be in the limelight nowadays.

First, we’ve Jeffery Ong, who “ran road” to Malaysia after making an unauthorised payout of about $33 million from his client’s account. He has since been arrested and charged; turned out that he’s been on a cheating spree since February 2019.

And yesterday, another lawyer went into the limelight: Samuel Seow.

If his name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s always been in the limelight; it’s just that yesterday, the entertainment lawyer was finally charged.

Here’s what happened.

A Recap That Seemed to Have Ended

Last year, an audio clip was leaked online, whereby Samuel was heard scolding a staff, and eventually led to the primary-school-style argument of “you beat me” “you beat me”.

Mothership.SG did a great transcript of the audio here, and if you’re free, go ahead and take a listen; you might just think that your fierce boss isn’t that nasty after hearing the entire conversation:

So, after the leak, it turned out that the employee was his niece, and that he had “acted in his capacity as an uncle and not as an employer”.

Didn’t know that uncle had the right to beat a niece, but anyways.

The niece, who was 19 last year, filed a police report. What’s even more interesting is that Samuel’s other company also filed a police report against the girl for storing sensitive information in her personal laptop and refusing to return it after she was terminated.

And then…everything turned 180 degree.

About a week later, both parties dropped their police reports.

What’s more, the girl even said that her actions were “misguided”, and added, “Mr Seow remains an important mentor and benefactor to me.”

Okay.

The almost-too-perfect ending did not conclude as recently, a video footage of what happened last year was uploaded on YouTube.

In addition, there’s another video that doesn’t seem to be related to the leaked audio recording:

Samual then released a statement: “I had admitted that there was an issue in my office last year, and will leave the police to reach their findings. Being an entrepreneur is never easy and juggling between finding the work, feeding people and paying salaries on time is a constant struggle. As someone who has three companies to manage, I do get stressed up. It’s not an excuse but it’s been a year and the relevant people have made peace and wish for this to be behind us.”

So you thought it’d have ended.

Apparently not.

It’s just begun.

Lawyer Now Charged

Though the niece has withdrawn the police report, it seems like no one can escape the long arm of the law.

Yesterday (7 June 2019), the lawyer was charged with assaulting and threatening three of his law firm’s employees at their office on two separate occasions last year.

One of the charges was of voluntarily causing hurt, another two of criminal force on a person and one under the Protection from Harassment Act.

It’s unknown who filed for protection.

While he’s a lawyer, he’s an entertainment lawyer so he’s represented by other lawyers.

He’ll be appearing in court again on 5 July 2019.

For voluntarily causing hurt, he could be jailed up to two years, fined up to S$5,000, or both.

For using criminal force on a person, he could be jailed up to three months, fined up to S$1,500, or both.

And for causing distress to a person, he could be jailed up to six months, fined up to S$5,000, or both.

Well, at least it’s not as bad as the other lawyer, who could be jailed up to ten years.