His contract ran until 2029 - the company said quitting would cost S$1.7 million
A Singapore energy firm wanted S$1.7 million from a broker who quit. It got S$132,000.
Poten & Partners, an energy and ocean transportation brokerage affiliated with BGC Partners, took its former senior liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) broker to the Singapore High Court after he resigned on April 4, 2025 - just 39 days after signing his latest employment contract with the company. In a judgment handed down on October 7, 2026, the court awarded the firm S$131,745.27 across three claims. A long way from the S$1.7 million-plus it had chased.
The broker had worked at Poten since November 2017. In February 2025, he signed his fifth employment contract with the firm - an amended agreement that locked in an "Initial Period" running through to May 15, 2029.
Then he quit.
He emailed his immediate superior on April 4, 2025, saying he was resigning effective immediately and understood his six-month garden leave would run until October 2025. He did not return to the office.
What happened next is where the contract dispute kicked in.
BGC's HR manager emailed the broker five days later, directing him to return to work until the expiry of his notice period - which she put at May 15, 2029. When he did not comply, a demand letter followed for S$1,748,807.66. The broker replied that he saw no reason to pay money to Poten.
The fight over six words
The case turned on six words tucked into the termination clause. Clause 10.1 stated that either party must give "at least six months' notice," with "such notice not to expire prior to the last day of the Initial Period."
Poten read that to mean the broker's notice period was not six months but the entire remaining contract term - four years, one month and 12 days. On that reading, the broker owed S$1,737,433.79 in payment in lieu of notice, or PILON - essentially, the salary he would have earned for the rest of the contract.
The court disagreed.
The six-month notice provision, the court found, was effectively dead for almost the entire Initial Period. No notice given before November 15, 2028 could satisfy the requirement that it not expire before the end of the term. In substance, the clause reinforced the fixed-term commitment rather than creating an actual notice period.
Because the contract contained no workable notice provision for the bulk of the Initial Period, the court turned to the fallback in Singapore's Employment Act. For employees with more than five years' service, the statutory default is four weeks' notice.
That meant the broker owed Poten S$32,384.62 in PILON. Not S$1.7 million.
The court was direct about the effect of Poten's preferred reading. It "clearly penalises" the employee financially for resigning during the Initial Period and "shackled" him to the contract term. Poten had drafted the contract itself, and the court applied the legal principle that ambiguous contract terms are read against the party that wrote them.
Even if Poten had been right, it would still have lost
Though the notice period issue was already settled, the court went further. Even if Poten's interpretation were correct, the resulting obligation would amount to an unenforceable penalty - a payment so disproportionate to the employer's actual loss that the law will not enforce it.
The court drew a parallel with the earlier Singapore decision in Kelington Engineering, where a clause requiring an employee to pay three years' salary for departing early was struck down. The same reasoning applied here. The S$1,737,433.79 was calculated entirely by reference to salary and remaining contract term, with no account for how long it would take to replace the broker, whether Poten could reduce its losses, or what might happen to LPG markets over four years. There was, the court found, "no sufficient relationship" between the sum claimed and the loss Poten could reasonably have expected.
The damages claim that fell apart
Poten had also pursued a separate damages claim of up to approximately S$4.1 million, based on projected profits the broker would have generated through May 2029. A company director calculated those figures by averaging the broker's historic profits from 2018 to 2024 and projecting them forward.
The court found the projections fell short on two fronts. First, the director had not accounted for geopolitical events that could affect LPG prices - and acknowledged at trial that he could not predict where the market would go. Second, Poten produced no evidence that the broker's clients would not have continued trading with the firm after his departure.
On mitigation, the court was equally unimpressed. Poten never asked the broker to hand over his client list. His immediate superior explained at trial that he thought it would have been "pointless" given the broker was due to join a new company. The two replacement brokers Poten hired had no cargo broking experience, and the company had not researched who the high-performing brokers in Southeast Asia were - hiring both replacements through introductions by friends instead.
The damages claim failed entirely under common law. However, the Employment Act provides a separate, fixed remedy for employees who break their contracts by walking off the job: a sum equal to what they would have owed as PILON. The court awarded Poten a further S$32,384.62 on that basis.
The salary he kept
Finally, the court upheld Poten's claim that the broker had no right to keep two months' salary he received for work he never did. Poten had continued paying his salary for April and May 2025, totalling S$66,976.03, despite his absence.
The broker's defence was that he had been on garden leave - but his own lawyer conceded at trial that Poten had never exercised its contractual right to place him on garden leave. The broker eventually admitted as much himself.
When asked at trial why he had not returned the overpaid salary, his answer was that he did not know how.
The bottom line
Poten succeeded on all three claims - PILON, statutory damages, and the salary clawback. But the total award of S$131,745.27 was a fraction of the S$1.7 million it had sought in PILON alone, let alone the S$4.1 million damages claim.
For HR teams drafting fixed-term contracts, the practical lesson is sharp: a notice clause designed to lock an employee in for the full term may end up containing no operative notice period at all - leaving the statutory default, not the employer's preferred reading, to fill the gap.
The decision was handed down by the General Division of the High Court of the Republic of Singapore. Costs are yet to be determined.
