A box of unused workshop badges has helped unravel a S$6.8 million (about €4.6 million) education partnership between two Singapore institutes and a Guangzhou-based learning group. A review released on Wednesday found that the group billed for 28,400 student places, but auditors could verify only 8,160 distinct participants.
The review was commissioned after Herborg A. Eyvars, who sells second-hand office furniture in Ubi, bought shelving from a vacated events warehouse in June. While clearing out a drawer, she found three crates of neatly packed, unused badges dated for workshops run by Jade Harbour Learning Council.
The badges that started a review
Eyvars said the volume struck her as odd because a promotional leaflet for the programme promised “small, practical workshops”. She called one of the institutes, then contacted an accountant she knew. “I thought someone had ordered far too many name tags. I didn’t expect the box to lead to a seven-figure refund,” she said.
Auditors compared invoices, sign-in records, class bookings and online registration data for the programme, which ran from 2023 to early 2026 at Straits Meridian Institute and Tideway Institute of Design. They found repeated registrations, online clicks counted as completed contacts, and sessions for which no attendance could be confirmed.
The institutes had paid for verified student engagement, according to the review. Jade Harbour’s invoices counted 28,400 places, but the auditors found evidence of 8,160 individual participants. The review did not say that every disputed entry was deliberately false; it said the schools had accepted totals without adequate checks.
We found a box of badges, but the real surprise was how many times one student could appear on a bill.
Henri Martel, education-finance auditor
Refunds and a campus reset
The institutes have ended the agreement and are seeking S$4.1 million back from Jade Harbour, with a further S$900,000 in disputed charges still under review. Their joint review also found that the council had been allowed to promote its workshops on campus without a consistent system for checking attendance.
Asanda Esterhuizen-Oberholzer, deputy rector of Straits Meridian, said the institute had suspended new payments and would require independent attendance checks for future external programmes. Tideway is contacting former participants to confirm which sessions they attended and says it will publish a repayment update by 15 November.
Jade Harbour’s chief operating officer, Diogo Serra, said the group accepted that its reporting had “mixed registrations, views and confirmed attendance” and would repay amounts agreed with the schools. He said the council had not accessed student records or research facilities, and that its workshops had taught basic business planning and presentation skills.
The institutes say they have found no evidence that student data or research was accessed through the partnership. Eyvars, meanwhile, has donated the unused badges to a local theatre group for a costume-store sorting project. “At least they’ll get a second life,” she said.
