SINGAPORE, Sept 10 — The Singapore High Court has rejected a listed company chief executive’s bid to recover S$468,090 (RM1.5 million) he spent on his former girlfriend during their more than one-year relationship.
The Straits Times reported that Senior Judge Lee Seiu Kin ruled that most of the money claimed by Chander Agarwal, CEO and managing director of TCI Express, had been given to his former girlfriend Felicia Lee as gifts rather than loans.
The amounts included about S$206,000 in credit card spending, S$129,000 on overseas trips, S$17,000 for a feng shui master for her flat and S$30,000 for a Stanford-NUS executive programme.
“The evidence before me clearly shows that the claimant, smitten by the defendant, had showered her with expensive gifts during their relationship,” Lee said.
“Unfortunately, when their relationship ended on a sour note, the claimant became embittered and was determined to extract a price from her.”
Agarwal also claimed he had lent Lee another S$50,000 to settle a debt with her former employer, but the judge found he had failed to prove that he had given her the disputed sums or that they were loans.
Lee said Agarwal could not produce evidence showing that Lee had requested the money as loans or agreed to repay him, while the circumstances surrounding a handwritten agreement he presented to the court were also found to be suspect.
The purported agreement stated that monthly sums of S$10,000 to S$25,000 received by Lee were his money, but she denied signing or seeing the document before the court proceedings.
The judge gave limited weight to a handwriting expert’s opinion that the signature was genuine, noting that Agarwal had not mentioned the agreement in his original statement of claim and only referred to it seven months later in an amended claim.
Lee also said the document was contradicted by the actual payments, which were made in varying amounts and for different purposes rather than as a monthly S$10,000 to S$25,000 payment.
The court heard that Agarwal had previously given Lee expensive gifts without expecting repayment, including luxury items from Hermes, Louis Vuitton and Prada, while also paying most of the expenses for a European trip they took together.
In a WhatsApp exchange in August 2022, when Lee asked how she could repay him, Agarwal replied: “No need. I am not a moneylender.”
Agarwal and Lee met on a flight in 2019 and began a romantic relationship in September 2022, but separated in December 2023 after he suspected her of infidelity, prompting him to file the lawsuit in March 2024.
The judge also rejected Agarwal’s claim that Lee had induced him to spend the money by falsely representing that they were in a genuine and exclusive relationship and that she would repay him, noting that evidence showed Agarwal had sexual relations with other women during their relationship.
