Singapore's 29-year-old star banker goes from Goldman Sachs to grief
There have been better times to be Liu Kai.
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Kai, who also goes by the name Kelvin Liu, was charged last week by a Singaporean court for assisting convicted money launderer Lin Baoying in using a forged Chinese tax document to open a Swiss bank account as part of a broader $2.3bn money laundering scandal, the biggest in Singapore’s history.
Now 35, Liu was just 29-years-old when he joined Julius Baer and was seen as a starlet of Singapore’s private banking scene.
A Chinese national, Singapore permanent resident, and graduate of Peking University in economics and artificial intelligence, Liu had a brief stint at UBS in Hong Kong before joining Credit Suisse in 2014. He was a China-focused relationship manager for the Swiss bank that he left in 2019 for another, Julius Baer. He then went on to join Goldman Sachs in 2022.
Liu wasn’t quite a superstar, but he had all the hallmarks of one. Bloomberg said that he was headhunted for the Goldman move, and was paid very well “for his age”. He was also a capable English speaker. He left the firm, which is not involved in the prosecution against him, around two months ago.
Liu’s co-defendant, 26-year-old Wang Qiming, had a similar trajectory before the case. Wang graduated from the University of Melbourne and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University before joining Citibank. Bloomberg alleges that he was bringing in “millions in deposits” for the firm within two years of joining – a career progression that had colleagues raising their eyebrows and the bank filing reports on his transactions to the Singaporean authorities.
Both Liu and Wang are currently on bail (S$15k and S$25k, respectively) and are due to reappear in court on the 12th and 19th of September, respectively. The defendants of the wider money laundering case were jailed for terms between 13 and 17 months; the bankers might be hoping for the same (relative) leniency from a state not known for giving it.
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