Lawyers told The Straits Times that many of these fugitives return not because their money ran out but mainly because of homesickness or harassment.

The most recent to surrender himself is ex-Cortina senior supervisor Jerry Ee.

He is alleged to have stolen 386 watches in six designer brands – Audemars Piguet, Girard-Perregaux, Panerai, Patek Philippe, Rolex and Vacheron Constantin – and 194 guarantee cards.

The total worth of the watches: a cool $7.9 million. Also missing from the store: $27,137. He is believed to have made off with this loot after the store closed on Christmas Day.

It has been reported that he made his way to Malaysia by car and then flew to Thailand.

It is not known where he stayed there but a source told The Straits Times that he lived it up "like a prince".

On March 17, he surfaced in Bangkok and gave himself up at the Singapore Embassy in Bangkok. With him, were 230 watches.

He was repatriated to Singapore on March 19 and now probably faces a long jail term if convicted.

Mr Ee spoke Thai and had gone there regularly on holidays with his friends. But this time, he was on his own.

He kept in touch with his close friends and it was childhood buddy Chang Jun who urged Mr Ee to give himself up.

He did after less than three months on the run. So much for being a millionaire fugitive.

All that said, it must be noted that ex-lawyer David Rasif is still on the run after taking about $11.3 million of his clients’ money in 2006.

But Mr Ee and Mr Rasif are poles apart in character.

Mr Rasif was a sociable sort of guy, who could strike up friendships easily. Mr Ee was rather reserved, with a small circle of close friends.

Loneliness and peer pressure could have made Mr Ee give up but Mr Rasif is still going strong as a solo deperado.

His family is here and his wife has divorced him.

His whereabouts have been the subject of much speculation, with the strong contenders being Thailand and Argentina.

Prominent criminal lawyer Subhas Anandan of KhattarWong said that there were many Singaporean fugitives in Thailand.

He found this out on a visit to Bangkok last year.

In a popular nightclub, nearly a dozen men came to shake his hand and greet him.

When he told his hosts that he was surprised he was so well-known among the Thais, they laughed and said that his "fans" were all Singaporean fugitives.

Mr Anandan said that they are drawn there because Thailand has a large number of local Chinese and assimilation is easy.

Lawyer Christopher Bridges also pointed out that Thailand was a favourite sanctuary as it does not have any extradition arrangements with Singapore. More importantly in his view is that the locals have a live-and-let-live attitude.

"They might think a person is suspicious but many won’t confront him or report him to the authorities if he does not cause any trouble," said Mr Bridges, who runs his own law firm.

That is not the case for many fugitives hiding in Taiwan or China, said some lawyers who had acted for clients that had fled there.

The clients had complained that local gangsters would extort money from the fugitives and whatever loot there is will quickly dry up.

"In my opinion, the best thing is to get paid for a honest day’s job and spend the money with family and friends," said Mr Peter Low of Colin Ng & Partners.

"Those are the treasures a man needs and not millions of stolen dollars or watches," added the senior lawyer.

Read more about Jerry Ee's return to Singapore: Recovered watches worth $4.6 million, Fugitive Ee back in Singapore

Yet, step into any courtroom and you will find that very few in the legal profession  are clear or concise.

For example, I often see the accused in the dock whispering anxiously to his lawyer.

In one instance, instead of telling the court that his client had decided to plead guilty, the lawyer turned to the judge and declared that his client "intends to take a certain course of action".

The accused, already wracked by anxiety about the grim fate that awaited him, was now thrown into even more confusion trying to decipher what his lawyer had told the court.

Perhaps, it's bad luck for a lawyer to use the "guilty" word?

Of course, there are some lawyers who are truly eloquent, clear and unambiguous in court. But for every such gifted advocate, there are a dozen lawyers and deputy public prosecutors (DPP) who appear to suffer from linguistic lapses unbecoming to the profession.

These are the ones who hide behind legal jargon at the first opportunity - and end up with their feet in their mouths.

As the following examples could prove embarrassing to these "learned friends"; no names will be mentioned.

Recently in the High Court, a deputy public prosecutor asked a policewoman: "So pursuant to the question, you answered the question?"

The sergeant looked totally dumbfounded, probably thinking that "pursuant" was something police officers did when a suspect tries to run away.

All the DPP wanted to know was whether the police witness had answered the question the defence lawyer had asked her earlier.

A lawyer, with the exalted rank of Senior Counsel, told me that lawyers should make their questions easy to understand.

"Confusing your own witnesses is no way to win a case," he said, getting his point across with hardly any effort.

But confusing one and all in court happens all too frequently.

A few hours in court will  reveal that lawyers never apologise but merely "stand corrected" when a judge ticks them off.

And the situation becomes laughable when a lawyer or DPP imagines himself as a character in a popular television legal drama, spitting out questions relentlessly. Sometimes so rapidly that their brains are left sputtering behind.

Here's an example from a murder trial some months ago. Imagine the DPP hardly pausing between questions until the judge brings it all to a screeching halt.

DPP: Now, at this stage, you said you heard the victim shout. What did she shout?

Witness: She shouted ‘Ah’.

DPP: Very loudly?

Witness: Yes

DPP: Was she screaming?

Judge: Hold on. What is the difference between shouting loudly and screaming?

DPP: Yes, Your Honour, I will not go there then.

In another murder case, the DPP, also on a roll, asked the witness a series of increasingly irrelevant questions.

When he asked about the exact size of the flat the accused person stayed in, the judge had obviously had enough.

"So, now you want to buy the flat?" he asked sarcastically.

If irrelevant questions are not bad enough, there are also the frequent court cliches such as "If it pleases the court", "If I may" or its alternative: "With the court's permission".

These expressions may be part of court etiquette, but I sense that some judges are clearly piqued by the endless repetition. So much so that after one too many "if I mays", a judge exclaimed: "Of course you may if it helps your client's case."

And when arguing appeals against convictions or sentences, DPPs are famous for repeating that the learned trial judge had "carefully and accurately considered the facts of the case".

The frequent mouthing of such words always leaves me wondering if any learned judge would consider the facts in any other way.

For crying out loud, stop saying the obvious; there might be less hot air leading to less global warming!

The purposeful stride slackens. The eyes lose focus. The shoulders slouch.

They go down an aisle but are soon completely lost, ending up following the signs dangling from the ceiling.

Even these are not much help because once in front of the rows of laundry detergents, they have to peer carefully at labels before making their pick.

In contrast, women are the opposite.

Once through the doors of a supermarket, their eyes light up. Their posture stiffens and off they go, with the accuracy of a cruise missile.

Administrative manager Douglas Tan perhaps hit the nail on the head when he confessed that walking into a supermarket makes him uncomfortable.

The bigger the supermarket, the more exasperated he becomes, said the 29-year-old.

“There are just too many colours, too many choices, that I feel as if I’m drowning in sensory stimuli,” he explained.

He is not alone. Other men might not admit it but it is common knowledge that men do not care much for shopping.

That’s thoroughly understandable.

It’s only human nature to shun activities one is not good at.

Psychologists have long speculated that differences in how the two genders view colours can be traced way back to the days, where Daddy hunted sabre-toothed tigers for meat while Mummy collected fruits and other vegetable goodies for the dinner table.

And here’s what Dr Anya Hurlbert and Dr Yazhu Ling of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, found in 2007.

The two researchers flashed coloured patches on a computer screen for some 180 men and women of British and Chinese origin, all in the early 20s.

Their findings reveal that men and women from the two groups did not differ in their colour preferences.

There was one striking exception.

British and Chinese women preferred reddish hues such as pink to greenish-blue ones. It was the opposite for men, who went for green and blue.

As most fruit are reddish in colour, the researchers suggested that a preference for red, pink, and other bright hues could greatly benefit those who gather such fruits.

Could this be the reason why men are so lost in a shopping environment?

Yes, but there’s more.

Dr Joshua New of Yale University discovered that men can’t navigate  shopping aisles. He wanted to test his hypothesis that women remember the location of food better than men do.

He gathered 41 women and 45 men and took them shopping. Each participant visited six of 90 food stalls in the market and were given a piece of food to eat. They were then led to the centre of the market.

When asked to point toward the particular stalls, one at a time, women were nearly 10 per cent more accurate than men at identifying each stall; and the further from the centre the worst the directions got.

It would be like a  person ending up in Bishan Central instead of Toa Payoh Central after starting off in a straight line from the Raffles Town Club along Bukit Timah Road – which is about a three-kilometre miss by my reckoning.

Now, it’s common knowledge that men, generally, insist on taking the lead and often taking everyone else for a not so merry go round.

Yet, they continue to do.

Psychologists should now ascertain if women deliberately allow men to believe that their navigational skills are superior just to flatter the male ego.

Those findings would be an eye-opener.