SINGAPORE — A former senior staff member at Standard Chartered Bank (Stanchart) in Singapore was fined S$10,000 on Thursday (Aug 8), for tricking the senior management into believing that sensitive data relating to the bank would be leaked.

Nagarajan Balajee, 36, who had worked at Stanchart for 15 years, did this in September last year.

He had earlier tried to stop an impending retrenchment exercise — one where he had been asked to identify the employees who were to get the axe.

The court heard that the Indian national was stressed at the prospect of having to retrench his fellow employees, several of whom had pleaded with him to be able to keep their jobs.

Nagarajan, who was head of financial and management reporting (digital banking), had tried to persuade his line manager, Mr Farid Ferdous Howladar, to discontinue the retrenchment exercise, but to no avail.

Mr Farid told him that it was a necessary cost-cutting measure and assured him that Stanchart had measures to help retrenched employees find new jobs.

Then on Sept 27 last year, Nagarajan prepared an article titled “Is Standard Chartered Bank failing in its Digital Transformation agenda?”, and sent it anonymously to Mr Aalishaan Zaidi, the global head of digital banking, in a desperate bid to change his mind.

In the email, Nagarajan tried to extort S$500,000 from Mr Viswanathan Ramachandran, the group head of retail banking, by threatening to publish the article on social media unless he agreed to pay the sum by 11am the next day.

To render his threat more credible, he attached a PDF file containing the article, as well as photographs of two confidential Stanchart audit reports in the email.

Mr Aalishaan panicked upon realising that the email attachments contained genuine information that was meant only for internal circulation, and alerted the bank’s management to the email.

Mr Aalishaan made a police report at about 7pm that night.

This sparked an extensive investigation that saw the police convening a case conference with the Stanchart management, compiling a list of employees who had been or were at risk of retrenchment, and conducting background checks on them.

Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Etsuko Lim said that the investigation even employed the help of Google, which helped to “conduct screenings”.

These steps led the police to the wrong suspect, because Nagarajan could not be traced through an IP address since he had used his mobile phone to email Mr Aalishaan, which used a SIM card belonging to a Stanchart-issued mobile phone an employee had misplaced. The mobile connections rendered the connecting IP addresses volatile, the DPP said.

Mr Viswanathan Subramaniam, an implementation specialist at Stanchart, was instead thought to be the perpetrator since he was the author of the template Nagarajan used to create the article.

The police’s suspicions were directed at Mr Viswanathan Subramaniam also because he had access to audit reports.

It was not stated in court documents how the police eventually caught up with Nagarajan, who was arrested at about 4.15pm on Sept 30 last year.

DPP Lim noted that Nagarajan deleted the shell email account he used to send the email at about 10pm on Sept 27, then disposed his phone at East Coast Park jetty on Sept 30.

In sentencing Nagarajan, District Judge Marvin Bay said it is significant to note that he never provided any bank account or any means for Stanchart to pay his stipulated ransom.

“The fact that he deleted the account immediately after sending the message makes it unlikely that Mr Nagarajan was operating with a view to financial gain,” the judge said.

“The facts show that Mr Nagarajan had been genuinely stressed over the retrenchment exercise he was assigned to undertake, and these stresses had misdirected him toward committing the two criminal acts.”

He noted that the prosecution had proceeded on a less serious charge under the Protection from Harassment Act (Poha) instead of a charge of criminal intimidation by anonymous communication, which carries a maximum jail term of nine years.

Under the Poha charge, Nagarajan could have been jailed up to six months, on top of a fine.

Speaking through his lawyer, Nagarajan said that he could pay S$7,000 of his S$10,000 fine on Thursday, and would pay the rest on Aug 13.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said that the former Stanchart senior staff was fined over an attempt to stop a retrenchment exercise. This is incorrect. He was dealt with by the courts for blackmailing the bank, after he became stressed from being asked to identify employees who were about to get laid off, according to court documents. We are sorry for the error.