Singapore Pastor sentenced to 20 years in prison for using £23m of the church money to fund his wifes rap career

Court rejects claim that mission to turn a pastor’s wife called Ho into a global rap star was designed to spread God’s word to the world

City Harvest Church founder Kong Hee (R) arrives with his wife Ho Yeow Sunat the district state courts in Singapore

• #Malistrip Remma x Young Rondo – The Hotspot | @PACTV

  Read

  

Six leaders of a Singaporean “mega-church” have been convicted of a $36 million (£23 million) fraud after diverting the donations of disciples into a failed project to turn a pastor’s wife called Ho into a global rap music star.
Kong Hee, the founder and chief pastor, and five aides failed to persuade the judge that the scheme was a legitimate use of church funds to spread God’s word to the secular world by helping his wife break into US music market.
Sun Ho, 43, who performed under the stage name ‘SUN aka Geisha’, singing sexually-charged lyrics in skimpily-clad outfits in series of glitzy music videos, was not accused of any wrongdoing in the venture.

Sun Ho performs under the stage name SUN aka Geisha’

The evangelical message of the brash videos with international music and modelling stars was not immediately clear.

In one called “Mr Bill”, she played the stereotyped role of a down-pressed Asian wife who sang about killing her African-American husband, played by supermodel Tyson Beckford.
She also appeared in a 2007 music video with rapper and former Fugees’s star Wyclef Jean in an earlier attempt to cross over from Mandarin pop and reach a wider English-language audience.
The racy details of the two-year trial captivated the city state, which is famously law-abiding and where corruption is rare.
Kong and five other church leaders were convicted of stealing $17m ear-marked for building and investments by using fake bond investments to mask the spending on Ms Ho’s career.

A general view shows the exterior of the City Harvest Church in Singapore

And the court found that they used a further $18.5m to try to hide the first fraud from auditors.
Kong and his wife founded the City Harvest Church in 1989 and by last year it had grown into one of Singapore’s largest, with a congregation of 14,500.
The pastor’s supporters packed the court’s public benches after lining up for seats overnight.
Congregants have backed his defence that the funds were used to finance a “crossover project” to use Ms Ho as the public face and voice of a mission to use pop music to reach non-believers overseas.
The date for sentencing has not been set, but the offences of which the men were convicted carry long jail terms in a country that cracks down hard on financial crime.
For criminal breach of trust, the maximum sentence is life imprisonment, while for falsifying accounts, the penalty is a maximum of 10 years in jail.
“The accused persons chose to engage in covert operations and conspiratorial cover-ups,” said Judge See said in court. “They contrived to create cover stories and clever round-trips concealing their unlawful conduct,” Judge See said in court.
The singer, who showed up for the verdict in a grey pantsuit and sporting heavily highlighted hair, thanked followers for their support in a Facebook post.
“Pastor Kong and I are humbled by the tremendous outpouring of love and support shown to us during this time. We thank you for your prayers,” it read.
Ms Ho, who has released five Mandarin language albums in Taiwan, moved to Los Angeles in 2009 in an attempt to break into the Hollywood music world. But the scandal ended her ambitions.
Scandals and controversies about the lavish lifestyles and sexual exploits of pastors of international mega-churches have been increasingly common in recent years. In the US, there has even been a reality television series about the so-called “bishops of bling” who preach “prosperity theology”.
But this is the first such case in strait-laced Singapore. The predominantly ethnic Chinese population of the former British colony is mainly Buddhist and Taoist, but there has been a growth in affluent evangelical churches in recent years.