By Elena Chong, Courts Correspondent

LIM Chye Cheng decided to hoof it when he knew he was in trouble.

The former boss of the SME group of companies, which provides cleaning services, was staring at 101 criminal charges accusing him of masterminding a phantom worker scam.

The 53-year-old skipped town with his brother's passport and made his way to Malaysia, and then eventually to China, where he was caught and eventually repatriated to Singapore.

Yesterday, Lim was jailed 30 months - including a 12-month jail term for having his brother's passport without a reasonable excuse.

The prosecution described him as the 'de facto boss' who was running the whole operation.

Under his instructions, six companies under the SME group had applied for work permits for 153 foreign workers, after inflating the number of Singaporean workers on their payrolls.

The inflated figure allowed the companies to hire more foreign workers - beyond the number to which they were entitled - and thus save on labour costs. The list of phantom workers included the names of dead people and the elderly.

District Judge Liew Thiam Leng heard how Lim left for Malaysia on a boat from Punggol beach on March 23.

Lim had help from a Chinese national, Li Honglin, who arranged for the vessel to take him to a nearby kelong, where Lim took another boat to Johor Baru.

There, he asked Li to replace the photograph on his brother's passport with his own, but Li told him it could not be done.

Lim managed to make his way to China before he was sent back here on Aug 20. Details of how he travelled to China, or what happened to Li, were not mentioned in court.

Lim was convicted on 60 charges of conspiring with Steven Lee Kong Weng and Tay Hian Chye in the scam.

Lee, 60, then a director of nine companies within the SME group, has been jailed for 12 months while Tay, 47, the group's administration manager, received six months' jail.

To date, more than 30 people have been prosecuted over phantom worker scams.

Lim is the 18th person to be convicted.

All but one were jailed. Toh Eng Hock, 69, was fined $42,000 and spared a jail term by the court because of his ill health.

Lim could have been fined up to $15,000 and/or jailed for up to 12 months on each of the 60 charges.

For the passport offence, he could have been fined up to $10,000 and/or jailed for up to 10 years.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.