In recent months, oBike has been ringing in trouble.
Since June this year, the Singapore-based bicycle-sharing company announced that it will be ceasing operations after it had “secretly converted” users’ $49 deposits into an SVIP subscription, blaming it as a “technical lapse”.
This caused a lot of unhappiness among Singapore users who failed to get their refunds and were later told by LTA to direct their refund requests to CASE as LTA ordered oBike to remove all their bikes.
As the company begins its liquidation process, it was reported Monday (10 Sep) that the police are investigating oBike Singapore for misappropriation of funds after it was found to have transferred S$10 million to its Hong Kong office last month.
Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam wrote in a parliamentary reply that the police are involved and cannot provide further comments.
The funds’ transfer happened just after oBike announced its closure in Singapore.
oBike had accumulated S$12 million from Singapore users, according to its liquidators FTI Consulting, and the S$10 million was “netted off against a loan of S$11 million from oBike Hong Kong to its Singapore office”.
FTI Consulting’s senior managing director Joshua Taylor was quoted as saying: “Some of the transactions are inappropriate given the financial position of the company, and we will be looking at those a lot further.”
Singapore oBike users are owed S$8.9 million in total, according to Taylor.
Featured Image Credit: David Wong, South China Morning Post
