Legal recourse re: co-tenant who hasn't paid PUB/rent

[chuckd]

I'm trying to find out what possible legal recourse my flat mate and I may have against our third flat mate's reluctance to pay his final months rent and 4 months worth of shared PUB costs. Is small claims tribunal an option for such a situation?

To explain more, I live in a 3 bedroom shared apartment, the primary long term resident of the apartment and myself always pay our share of rent and utilities as and when they need to be paid. The third flat mate, who has sharing with us since Nov 2012 has been persistenly reluctant to pay rent on time (often 3 weeks late), and I've only just learned that he hasn't paid his share of the utilities since January of this year.

This third flat mate will be leaving us at the end of this month but so far he still hasn't made any contribution to the rent for April or made good on promises to pay his share of money he owes to us for PUB and things like AC maintenance fees.

When this tenant moved in he did pay $1400 as a deposit to us, so in a way we can just use this as his rent contribution, but it would still leave us out of 4 months worth of PUB.

Exluding rent I'd say he probably owes us something around $600. It may seem a paltry amount, but it would really be a bad sting for us if he left without paying us what he owes. Should he leave the apartment without paying us, is there any legal recourse I can take to recoup that money from him, would small claims tribunal apply to such a situation between private individuals?

Just to make clear, this third tenant is in Singapore on an EP (don't know what kind, but definitely EP) and his name and signature are on the tenancy agreement that we have with our landlord.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[zzm9980]

For that amount there probably isn't shit you can do on a shared t/a like that. I would just keep the deposit and each the S$600 loss.

For the future, I would structure the T/A in a way so that each of the three tenants owes 1/3rd (or whatever the agreed upon amount is) so that the land lord can evict him for failing to pay his third. That's how I know people in the US deal with shared tenancies like this. Not sure if you could convince a Singapore LL to agree to that.

[JR8]

Did you have any form of agreement (even verbal) with this tenant, as to how the rent and utilities were to be split?

The other thought is that his 'past performance' of paying x% of the rent and x% of the utils might establish that he agreed to this liability and split.

[offshoreoildude]

Threaten to contact his employer. Threaten him with SCT. The idea is to shame him into paying.