SINGAPORE – A three-year-long legal battle involving Singaporean Karan Chandur Tilani and a fraudulent multimillion-dollar diamond investment deal has been made public after the Court of Appeal recently dismissed Mr Tilani’s bid to keep court records confidential.
The documents detail an arbitration case where the court found that Mr Tilani, 32, had defrauded an investor over the value of a 2.08 carat “fancy vivid blue” diamond ring, and ordered that damages amounting to more that $2.38 million be paid as compensation.
The arbitrator, Justice Lai Siu Chiu, found that Mr Tilani had made false claims about the diamond ring which was named after British-born actress Jane Seymour, including that the “Jane Seymour diamond” was naturally mined and worth around $13.8 million.
Court papers noted those false claims were the basis for Dutch investor Maarten Hein Bernard Koedijk’s decision to enter into a number of deals with Mr Tilani.
Justice Lai found that the diamond was synthetic and that Mr Tilani had bought it off the shelf for US$19,136 (S$25,688).
The legal dispute began in 2021 when Mr Tilani, who is a director and former majority shareholder of Fantastic Xperience (FXPL), sold nearly 50 per cent of the company’s shares to Mr Koedijk.
For the transaction, Mr Tilani said he received $648,601 in cash from Mr Koedijk, and accepted part of the payment in cryptocurrency, valued at $2 million.
Mr Tilani claimed that Mr Koedijk owed him an outstanding $339,659, which he refused to pay. This prompted the Singaporean to begin arbitration proceedings.
Mr Koedijk countered by asserting that the deal was not an outright purchase of the company’s shares.
Instead, he said Mr Tilani had proposed a fractional ownership investment scheme to him and other investors, where they could own a certain percentage of the Jane Seymour diamond ring at an agreed price.
The ring, which Mr Tilani said was owned by FXPL, would eventually be sold and the investors or co-owners given part of the sale proceeds.
Mr Tilani had come up with a plan for Mr Koedijk to temporarily hold the company’s shares while he arranged for the gem to be sold to the friend of an uncle, citing what he said was concerned about a “conflict of interest”, the court papers said.
This plan saw Mr Koedijk depositing cryptocurrency worth US$2 million with Mr Tilani as security on the assurance that the latter would not access it.
Justice Lai went on to dismiss Mr Tilani’s claims and ordered him to pay compensation to Mr Koedijk – up until this point, the arbitration was confidential as court documents were sealed.
This changed after Mr Tilani responded to Mr Koedijk’s statutory demand for payment and attached the sealed documents in his legal response to the Dutchman. This meant that the previously confidential arbitration proceedings were now in the public record.