Roland Tay

Born in 1947 as the fourth of 10 children to a hawker in a coffee shop along Lavender Street,^[2] Tay began his working life as a coffee boy at his family's coffee shop. He helped the family's coffee shop business by serving coffee and tea to customers in Singapore Casket and learned about the funeral trade.^[3]

When his parents died in 1973 from stomach cancer, 6 months apart from each another, Tay inherited the coffee shop before renting it out to start a transport business for students and factory workers. But it wasn't until in 1984 when he converted the coffee shop into Casket Palace, which was subsequently bought over by Singapore Casket.^[4]

In the subsequent years, Tay started several funeral companies. Following the now defunct Casket Palace, he founded Casket Fairprice^[5] in 1993 which was subsequently managed by his two children from his first marriage.^[6] He later founded Tong Aik Undertaker, Hindu Casket and Direct Funeral Services.

Tong Aik Undertaker is in charge of operating the Singapore Police Force's police hearse, and also has operated as Direct Funeral Services^[7] since 2000.

In 2004, Tay with Direct Funeral Services conducted the pro-bono funeral of Huang Na, an eight-year-old girl who was murdered brutally in Pasir Panjang, Singapore.^[8] This was followed by another pro-bono funeral in 2005 of 22-year-old Chinese national Liu Hong Mei, who was murdered and chopped into seven parts before being dumped in the Kallang River.^[9] The process of sewing the body parts back together took Roland Tay and his embalmers 7 hours.^[10] He also oversaw the funeral of Li Hong Yan, a 24-year-old village girl from Heilongjiang who drowned at Sentosa.^[11]

Tay reportedly collected around three hundred identity cards of deceased persons whom were without family, and for whom he conducted pro bono funeral services.^[4][12]

One of Tay's more memorable cases is the pro bono funeral he provided for the primate tourism icon Ah Meng of Singapore.^[13]

In 2013, Tay brought his daughter Jenny Tay into the business, who subsequently helped him rebrand the undertaking firm as a managing director^[14] after quitting her job at a marketing firm. Her husband Darren Cheng also closed down his counselling business and joined her in the company as an executive director.^[15] Thanks to their efforts, the business saw its annual revenue tripled from SG$2 million to SG$7 million in the subsequent years, and alongside their main funeral services, Direct Funeral Services now offers additional services like grief counselling, funeral pre-planning, living funerals,^[16] and via their charitable subsidiary Direct Life Foundation, opened volunteering opportunities to the public and their employees for both the underprivileged and the elderly.^[17]

To this day, Tay continues managing pro-bono cases and alongside Jenny and Cheng, attend wakes under their company and Direct Life Foundation volunteering events.^[18]

In 2009, he was sentenced to six months’ jail for criminal intimidation and for his role in beating up a former business partner. He had swung a crowbar at the victim and threatened to kill him in an altercation in Lavender Street in 2007.^[19]

In September 2022, he was charged with tax evasion, and failing to register his business for Goods and Services Tax(GST). He received three charges of understating his income to evade tax and another count under the GST Act. He was also accused of failing to notify the Comptroller of GST of his company's liability to register for GST in 2010, resulting in $286,963 in tax that was not accounted for.^[20]

On 5 September 2024, he plead guilty to the charges. He paid a $12,000 fine on the same day, in addition to $529,321.28 to be paid over one and a half years.^[19]

Tay married his first wife in his early 20s and together they had a son and a daughter who both manage Casket Fairprice. At some point, the marriage ended with a divorce. His second marriage, which also ended with a divorce in 2001, bore him another 2 daughters, including Jenny Tay who now manages Direct Funeral Services.

Later, Tay married his third wife Sally Ho. However, both Tay and Ho filed and finalized their divorce in June 2013 before being embroiled into a court battle over their properties. According to the court papers, the cumulated properties were estimated to be a total of about $20 million.^[21] In 2019, the court ruled that Tay receive 60% of the matrimonial assets while Ho received 40%. The verdict also saw Ho being required to hand over her interests in the Direct Funeral business to Tay, hence effectively ending her membership with the company.^[22] Ho eventually moved on to set up her own funeral company, Dignity Funeral, together with her son from her first marriage, Jeffery Tay.^[23]