Knight, who had set up the Singapore police’s commercial affairs department in 1984, died while on a flight from Australia back to the city-state, Singapore’s Straits Times reported.

He was the prosecutor when MCA’s fifth president Tan Koon Swan was convicted of share manipulation and criminal breach of trust (CBT) involving his holdings in Pan-Electric Industries.

Tan, who contended that he was made a scapegoat, was sentenced to two years in prison in Singapore and told to pay a S$500,000 fine in 1986. He stepped down as MCA president and Gopeng MP.

However, in a separate CBT case in 1996, Singapore’s then chief justice Yong Pung How found that the provision Tan was charged with “was wrong in law”.

In his 2012 book titled “The Prosecutor”, Knight admitted that Tan was wrongly charged and jailed, and apologised for his role in the case. Tan later accepted Knight’s apology.

Knight himself was convicted of corruption in 1991, which saw him losing his post as the head of the police’s commercial affairs department and barred from legal practice.

In 1998, he was convicted of misappropriation of funds while leading the commercial affairs department. However, he was reinstated as a lawyer in 2007.