28-year-old was trying to pay off family debts of $120,000. -ST
TO PAY off family debts of $120,000, Charles Tan Boon Tien started a sideline selling mostly obscene movies.
The 28-year-old business analyst on Thursday pleaded guilty in a district court to dealing in 11 obscene video CDs last year. He also admitted to distributing films without a licence from the Board of Film Censors.
Acting on a tip-off, police arrested Tan on March 27 last year as he was about to post the 11 movies to customers.
In his Woodlands Ring Road flat, which he shares with his parents and grandmother, there were another 1,106 obscene movies and 169 uncensored movies.
District Judge Shaiffudin Saruwan will consider these offences when passing sentence on March 18.
The court was told that Tan advertised on the Yahoo classified website and customers would e-mail him for a list of the movies he offered.
Payment would be via Internet payment or ATM transfer and Tan would post or deliver the movies.
He confessed to duplicating the VCDs on his laptop and desktop computer and admitted that the $13,040 in his bank account were earnings from his illegal activities.
Asking the judge to consider imposing a fine on Tan, his lawyer, Mr Anand Nalachandran, said that a psychiatrist, who treated Tan last June called it 'a sad case of filial piety gone wrong'.
Tan's father was retrenched as a marketing manager in 1999. Unable to find full-time work, the father started a bubble teashop in 2001. It soon failed, incurring a debt of $50,000.
Tan, an only child, who was then studying for a Bachelor of Arts degree at the National University of Singapore, supported himself by trading in collectible toys and music CDs over the Internet.
By the time he graduated in 2003, Tan had saved $30,000. To earn more, he started selling obscene movies.
By 2005, he had saved $50,000 from his sideline and from his salary as a market research analyst. He settled the debt only to find out that his father's CPF had been depleted and there was now an outstanding housing loan of $70,000.
They were also unable to sell the flat as they had not occupied it for five years.
For distributing obscene films, Tan could be fined $80,000 and jailed for two years. For failing to obtain censorship certificates, he could be fined $40,000 and jailed for a year.
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