She moonlit for a rival and still walked away owing next to nothing
District Judge Teo Guan Kee ruled on 17 August 2026 that a moonlighting employee owed her employer just $14,700 of the $208,000 claimed.
The case, decided in Singapore's State Courts centred on a Singapore corporate secretarial services provider (the Claimant) and a former employee (the Defendant) engaged from December 2021 to act as a local director or company secretary for the firm's clients. The Claimant dismissed the Defendant without notice on 16 October 2023 and sued two weeks later, alleging she had spent much of her tenure serving a rival corporate secretarial firm.
The Defendant admitted a striking set of facts. Her Singpass credentials, Singapore's national digital identity system, had been used for more than 800 transactions with the corporate registry, and records showed she had been named local director for 86 companies that were not the Claimant's clients. She had also been appointed a Qualified Individual for the rival firm, a role needed to provide corporate secretarial services, and had issued the rival at least 18 invoices for nominee directorships and related work.
The Defendant maintained this was informal assistance rather than competing business. In her evidence, she described the arrangement as "purely functional, temporary and did not amount to competing business." District Judge Teo Guan Kee rejected this characterisation, finding her own admissions sufficient to establish breaches of Clauses 15 and 16 of her employment agreement, covering conflict of interest and non-competition, as well as an implied duty of good faith and fidelity owed to the Claimant. Because the contract allowed dismissal without notice for any misconduct, including breaches of those clauses, the judge held the termination valid and rejected her argument that a stricter "serious misconduct" threshold should have applied.
Establishing the breach, however, did not translate into a large damages award. The Claimant's largest claim, worth between roughly $118,000 and $121,000 and representing time the Defendant supposedly diverted from her employer to the rival, rested on the company director's own estimates of how long each filing should take. He said he was merely "personally aware" of the timings, and the judge found no evidence the Defendant had actually neglected her duties for the Claimant, awarding nominal damages of $100 instead. A further claim of about $113,000 for a lost chance to enter a partnership with the rival, and one of about $22,700 for reputational harm, were both dismissed as speculative or inconsistently calculated. A fallback claim for an account of profits was rejected outright. The only claim the Claimant fully proved was for client appointments the Defendant left unfinished when her employment ended, worth $14,583.33.
The Defendant fared little better on her counterclaim. Because her dismissal was valid, claims tied to wrongful termination, worth tens of thousands of dollars, collapsed entirely. She did recover $3,200 in unpaid October salary, backed by a payslip, but failed to prove she was owed repayment of about $2,700 in late filing penalties or about $8,300 in maternity leave salary she had earlier agreed to treat as unpaid. Interest of 5.33 percent a year applies to both awards, running from the dates each claim was filed.
The judgment makes clear that a proven breach of trust does not by itself establish a damages award. The employer still had to show actual loss to recover it, and where its estimates lacked support, the court simply declined to accept them.
