A former Mediacorp actor is facing six charges over an alleged S$14,400 government grant fraud, in a case that has dragged a once-familiar television face into Singapore's criminal courts.
Haden Hee, the younger brother of former Mediacorp actor Julian Hee, is accused of cheating offences linked to grants disbursed under Workforce Singapore (WSG) professional conversion programmes. His company, Hanguk Kitchen, received S$14,400 in grants, all of which has since been recovered. A co-accused, Chui Shien, was sentenced to five months' jail in February 2026 after pleading guilty to two charges of cheating involving S$8,400 and forgery; she began serving her sentence in March.
The case came to light after the Auditor-General's Office audited WSG's conversion programmes and flagged irregularities in documents submitted by Hanguk Kitchen. WSG lodged a police report in May 2020, and both Haden and Chui Shien were charged in 2024. Haden is currently out on S$30,000 bail, with his case slated for mention on October 5.
Haden appeared in the long-running Mediacorp drama Your Hand In Mine (2009) and later moved into the food business, owning several now-defunct eateries including Hungry Korean, where he later joined actress Cassandra See as a business partner.
The prosecution of grant fraud has been a quiet but persistent theme in Singapore's courts, as the government expanded wage and training subsidies over the past decade. Each conviction sends the same message to the SME sector: the audit trail always catches up. For Haden, once a familiar face on Channel 8, the bigger question is whether the courtroom will define the second act of a career that already pivoted once from acting to food.
The case is part of a broader enforcement wave against grant fraud that has embarrassed Singapore's skills-training bureaucracy. The most notorious episode came in 2017, when a syndicate siphoned nearly S$40 million from SkillsFuture credits through phantom courses — a scandal that triggered criminal prosecutions and a wholesale tightening of disbursement controls. Since then, the Auditor-General's Office has repeatedly flagged lapses in grant administration, and agencies including Workforce Singapore have moved to data-match claims against actual training records.
The sums in Haden Hee's case are modest by comparison — S$14,400, fully recovered — but prosecutors have shown little interest in proportionality when public money is involved. Singapore's courts treat cheating the state as an aggravating feature in itself, and the five-month jail term handed to co-accused Chui Shien in February underscores that even small-scale grant fraud draws custodial sentences.
For small businesses, the lesson is procedural: keep training records immaculate, because the audit that catches you may come years after the claim. For Haden, the stakes are personal. A grant-fraud conviction would close the door on any entertainment comeback and complicate the food-business career he built after leaving television.