BY AMANDA YONG

AFTER a number of ugly confrontations in the office with her ex-lover, she decided she had enough.

Ms Helina Chan, 46, sent a letter through her lawyers requesting that Mr Lim Chee Twang, 40, goon paid leave.

She wanted Mr Lim, who is a co-director and shareholder in their business, out of their office. His 'constant demands for money' were 'too disruptive', she said.

During one such incident last year, he had hurled accusations against her which cut her to the core.

Her voice broke as she recalled what happened. She said: 'On one occasion, I can't remember when... he did say, 'You treated me like that because I didn't sleep with you'.'

Pausing for a moment, she struggled to compose herself.

Then, her face still locked in a tight grimace, she added: 'I was very hurt.'

'I've never been so humiliated in my life... I helped him so much and he was humiliating me so much in front of my staff,' she said.

He had also threatened her, she told the court yesterday, her third day on the witness stand.

Ms Chan is being sued by Mr Lim for oppressing his rights as a minority shareholder and for mismanaging iPreciation, their art business.

They were a couple for six years until they broke up in 2005, but maintained their professional ties until he filed a suit against her last year.

Ms Chan said that in another incident, on 5 May last year, Mr Lim had demanded dividends to be paid to him. When Ms Chan told him she needed to first sort out the companies' accounts, he blew up.

'He said to me, 'You watch out. If I go down, you go down',' she said.

The employees in their office were also terrified of Mr Lim.

'They were torn between the two of us,' she said.

She mentioned these episodes when her lawyer, Mr William Ong, asked her to explain why she had requested Mr Lim to go on paid leave from 12 Jun last year.

Was the request for Mr Lim to go on paid leave related to her withdrawal and subsequent return of $4.021 million from a company bank account last year,Mr Ong asked.

No, it was because he was causing disruption in the office, she said.

She had earlier testified that she withdrew that sum of money on 23 Apr last year to secure her outstanding loans to several of the companies in their business.

She returned the sum to the same account on 9 Jun last year.

Mr Lim is alleging that that withdrawal was unauthorised and amounts to misappropriation of funds. He is also accusing Ms Chan of making unauthorised withdrawals from other bank accounts held by the business.

He claims that her move to remove him from the office and his termination as executive director were to prevent him from discovering her misappropriation of company funds.

Mr Lim was sacked from the iPreciation companies in August last year.

In his suit, he is accusing Ms Chan of wrongfully terminating him from his position and excluding him from taking part in the management of the companies.

Mr Lim claims that the companies operated as a group and he is entitled to a 40 per cent stake of the whole group.Heis asking the court to order Ms Chan to buy out his shares at fair value.

Dividends

He also claims Ms Chan wrongfully and without justification refused to pay out dividends to him despite a $10 million 'cash hoard'.

But Mr Lim may still end up with nothing even if the court rules in his favour.

This point was raised yesterday by his lawyer, Mr Alvin Tan, when he went through the balance sheets of the three iPreciation companies which are incorporated in Singapore.

It has a total of five companies.

Apart from the Singapore companies, one is incorporated in Hong Kong and the other in British Virgin Islands.

The financial statements of the Singapore companies, dated 31 Mar this year, showed that only one, iPreciation Pte Ltd, was in the pink of health.

The other two companies, iPreciation Fine Arts and iPreciation Contemporary, were in the red and operating at a loss of $1.75 million and$72,000 respectively.

Ms Chan is contending that the two companies incorporated overseas should be left out of this order because they are foreign companies. She also maintains that the companies are separate entities,and not a group.

Said Mr Tan: 'If at the end of the case, the court agrees with you that you should buy the plaintiff's shares... and then you say iPreciation Pte Ltd is yours, and the buy-out order is (only) for (iPreciation) Fine Arts and (iPreciation) Contemporary, the plaintiff would end up with nothing, correct?'

Ms Chan said: 'That's what business is. He will be entitled to the profit and to the loans and the debts of the company.'

The trial continues today.

This article was first published in The New Paper.