Citiraya's CEO stole clients' e-scrap, fled 19 years — 38 fresh charges caught up in 2026

Citiraya Industries made money recycling precious metals out of electronic scrap for chipmakers — Texas Instruments, AMD, Intel, 3M, Seagate, Infineon among its clients. From March 2003 its CEO Ng Teck Lee ran the scheme the other way: gratification totalling S$35,000 to three individuals, as inducements or rewards between March 2003 and April 2004, stopped AMD microchips being crushed and 3M gold scrap being sampled and weighed, while his brother was instigated to pay roughly S$1.8 million and US$200,000 in bribes to seven individuals to spare e-waste and secure or extend contracts.

The theft was industrial in scale: 89,760 kg of electronic chips entrusted to Citiraya were misappropriated and resold in Hong Kong and Taiwan; 112,798 kg of Intel Resale Corporation scrap and 416 kg of Agilent Technologies scrap were repackaged and exported instead of crushed; refining statements understated 3M's precious-metal yields to a finance manager between November 2003 and January 2005; and 97 sales invoices across Citiraya and six other companies were falsified. About US$45 million in proceeds moved to overseas accounts, US$1 million of it through an account his wife opened.

A complaint in December 2004 unravelled it: a chip meant to be destroyed for a US-based client surfaced in Taiwan after a police operation there. Ng fled Singapore before he could be charged and evaded authorities for nearly two decades under false identities with his wife. Companies named in the misappropriation charge included Infineon, which lost the most at 2,918 kg, plus ChipPac Malaysia, ST Microelectronics and RF Micro Devices.

The CEO controlled both ends of the destruction promise — what arrived and what was crushed — and nothing verified the gap of 89,760 kg of missing chips.

Bribes bought the absence of verification precisely where theft would show: no crushing, no sampling, no weighing.

Falsified invoices and understated refining statements made stolen volume look like ordinary trade on paper for well over a year.

A recycler's whole product is trust that entrusted material is destroyed: once the CEO monetised what clients thought was crushed, the company could not survive the reveal.

Citiraya was restructured in the wake of the scandal and renamed Centillion Environment and Recycling in 2006; after merging with a US firm it became Metech International in 2012. An order in 2011 seized about S$23M of Ng's assets, including his wife's. Extradited in December 2024 after 19 years at large, he was charged with criminal breach of trust and corruption, and on May 20, 2026 was handed 38 fresh charges spanning corruption, cheating, money laundering and falsification of accounts. His wife faces a money-laundering charge.