Britain's National Crime Agency has secured the forfeiture of assets linked to Su Binghai, a fugitive in Singapore's S$3 billion money-laundering case, including nine London apartments and rare dinosaur fossils. Su, who fled Singapore in August 2023 hours ahead of a police crackdown, agreed to a settlement under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
Su Binghai was not among the ten people convicted in Singapore. He was one of a wider group of suspects who left the city-state as the Commercial Affairs Department moved in August 2023, and Singapore police later said fifteen fugitives had agreed to surrender about S$1.4 billion in assets in exchange for investigations being closed and Interpol notices being withdrawn, while inquiries into others continued.
The British case followed a different legal route. The National Crime Agency brought civil proceedings against Su and his British company, Su Empire Ltd, which he had set up in March 2023, only months before he fled Singapore via Malaysia to London. Civil recovery under the Proceeds of Crime Act does not require a criminal conviction; it requires showing, on the civil standard, that property represents the proceeds of unlawful conduct.
Reporting on the settlement put the seized portfolio at more than £35 million in the British proceedings and itemised it in striking detail: nine London apartments valued at about £15 million, rare dinosaur fossils valued at about £12.4 million and a group of Chinese artworks valued at about £400,000. Under the agreed order, Su was to forfeit the assets, with a portion — reported as 25 per cent of sale proceeds in one account of the settlement — returned to him.
The dinosaur fossils are the detail that captured public imagination, and they are also diagnostic. Investigators around the world have watched laundering networks move value out of bank accounts, where it is traceable, and into portable, hard-to-value stores of wealth: art, collectibles, luxury watches, wine and, in this case, prehistoric specimens. Such assets can be bought through companies, held quietly and sold across borders, which is precisely why enforcement agencies have built specialist teams to follow them.
Su's London footprint also illustrates the second-city problem in the Singapore case. Money that entered Singapore's banks and property market did not stay there; suspects built parallel lives in London and elsewhere, with companies and homes ready before the raids came. Singapore seized what it could reach, banned the fugitives from returning and negotiated mass forfeitures. Britain then had to run its own process, under its own law, for the assets sitting in its jurisdiction.
For compliance officers, the settlement is a template and a warning. Fugitives can trade a large share of their wealth for legal finality, which critics call pragmatic and others call a discount on crime. But the alternative — years of contested litigation over fossils, flats and artworks in multiple courts — helps no victim and recovers less. The Su Binghai order shows global enforcement now pricing that trade-off openly, one seized asset class at a time.