TR EMERITUS

Karl Liew Kai Lung, son of Liew Mun Leong It’s often said that you can tell the nature and quality of a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable and I’m glad to say that Singapore’s High Court proved Singapore’s value as a society on 4 September 2020 when it acquitted Ms. Parti Liyani, an Indonesian maid who had been accused of theft and had previously served sometime in jail. Ms. Liyani was the maid of Mr. Liew Mun Leong, Chairman of Changi Airport and one of Singapore’s most prominent businessmen. The facts leading to her acquittal can be found in the written judgement by Justice Chan Seng Onn. In many ways the judgement reads like the plot of a Korean Drama and exposes Singapore’s institutions as being, well pliable to the whims of the rich and powerful. The police in particular come out looking exceedingly bad. One of the most obvious points recorded in the judgement is the fact that the police allowed the Liew family to use items in the boxes where some of the allegedly stolen items were kept. If you have watched enough shows on TV, you’ll know that this is clearly wrong. Then there was the fact that Ms. Liyani, who is not conversant in English (one of the reasons why Indonesian maids are paid less than their Filipina counterparts) was questioned in – English and that was translated for her in Bahasa Melayu when her native language is Bahasa Indonesia. While Malay and Indonesian are similar, there are significant differences in the mean of various words – significant enough for misunderstandings to occur in legal situations. Nobody bothered to inform Ms. Liyani that she had the right to have a Bahasa Indonesia interpreter present. Then there’s the role of Mr. Liew Mun Leong and his family and that is perhaps the biggest tragedy. Mr. Liew was once one of Singapore’s most respected businessmen. In many ways, he’s what you’d call the type of business hero that Singapore needs. While his is not quite the rags to riches story, he didn’t come from an elite school (Queenstown Technical) and he worked his way up. He is one of those very rare creatures. A Former civil servant who succeeded in the private sector and it’s not just Singapore that recognised his achievements. On 12 September 2017, Mr. Liew was conferred the rank of Knight in the French Legion of Honour (Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur) for his contributions to the French economy. More can be found here. Yet, when you read the efforts that he went through with his family to effectively stiff a maid earning something like $300 to $600 a month (Ms. Liyani started out on $300 a month and they doubled her pay towards the end of her service), one can’t help but feel that Mr. Liew has shown himself to be nothing more than a power hungry ghoul and you’re left wondering if Mr. Liew’s previous achievements were really due to anything more than the ability to peddle influence? One of the most striking points against Mr. Liew is the fact that he got his maid to work for his son in addition to himself (she had to clean his house, his son’s house and office). This is against the rules, though there are families who get around this by compensating the maid. Well, to be fair to Mr. Liew, he did compensate her to the princely sum of a few bucks a month, which he allegedly took his time to pay. Mr. Liew is not the only businessman who has proven to be an arsehole. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were notoriously temperamental bosses and both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have been known to be jerks. However, while these men may have been difficult to work with, there is no record of any of them going all out to destroy someone so much lower on the proverbial social scale. At one stage, Mr. Liew was making around $5,000,000 a year. In 2007, his bonus was over S$20 million. A summary of where Mr. Liew ranks of the pay scale can be found here. If you read the judgement, you’ll realise that the Liew family put in quite a bit of effort to get Ms. Liyani locked up. Think about it, a man who helms big companies and earns at least $5,000,000 a year went out of his way to “fix” a maid earning $7,200 a year (based on Ms. Liyani’s maximum salary of $600 a month). I stress that Ms. Liyani should not have gotten free pass if she had stolen things. However, based on the evidence as laid out in the judgement (this is a court judgement not an editorial piece), it is very clear that the Liew family conspired to frame a maid who had served them loyally for nine-years (she was accused of stealing a DVD player that didn’t work). What makes this worrying is that once the verdict came out and Ms. Liyani was acquitted, the powers that be proceeded to rush to defend Mr. Liew. One of the worst defenses came from that bastion of business transparency – Temasek Holdings, which bleated on about how Mr. Liew had contributed so much and the public should hear his side of the story. The report can be found here. Not to be outdone, the government lead by it’s least conflicted minister, Mr. K Shanmugaratnam (Minister for Law and Home Affairs – somehow there’s no conflict between the law maker and the law enforcer) proceeded to give a spiel about how there was not to be a witch hunt and the government would look into what went wrong. One cannot help but want to scream at officialdom for being “tone deaf,” and ask if the ruling party really wants to lose more seats. Sure, Mr. Liew has been a very successful businessman but that cannot distract us from the fact that he and his family have been guilty of several offenses that have been exposed in open court. By rushing to defend him, it gives the impression that the government is only interested in protecting one of its own, which is the very thing that Singapore tells the foreign investment community it does not do. The Prime Minister needs to reign in his wife and ministers. A bit of distance from Mr. Liew would help. He should look no further than predecessor who distanced himself from TT Durai of the National Kidney Foundation in 2005. There, the government had the sense to realise that Mrs. Goh’s peanut remarks were unhelpful and nobody rushed to defend Mr. Durai when his misdeeds were uncovered. While Mr. Liew and the government don’t emerge looking good from this entire saga, I believe that the incident shows that there is hope. There is hope that civil society groups like HOME (which supported Ms. Liyani) exist. These organisations provide some hope for the least of us. It’s also encouraging that there are lawyers like Anil Balchandani the Managing Proprietor of Red Lion Circle Advocates and Solicitors, who worked tirelessly and for free to see that Ms. Liyani got some justice. Justice Chan Seng Onn Lastly, there is the man that all Singaporeans need to be grateful for – Justice Chan Seng Onn, who weighed the evidence carefully and looked at the circumstances in a fair and impartial manner. He was not swayed by the influence that Mr. Liew had in the business community, ruled according to the evidence and even went as far as to commend Mr. Balchandani for representing Ms. Liyani so effectively. Justice Chan has given hope to Singapore by showing that there is a possibility of receiving fairness from the system and for the powers that be who might condemn fairness as an airy concept, they would do well to remember that foreign investors like places where there is rule of law rather than rule of personality.   Tang Li *Although I’ve been based mainly in Singapore for nearly two decades, I’ve had the privilege of being able meet people who have crossed borders and cultures. I’ve befriended ministers and ambassadors and worked on projects involving a former head of state. Yet, at the same time, I’ve had the privilege of befriending migrant labourers and former convicts. All of them have a story to tell. All of them add to the fabric of life. I hope to express the stories that inspire us to create life as it should be.      Read More →

Liew Mun Leong Honest speaking, I did not follow up very closely on the case. But I hope to be objective in my views and that is what a democratic society should be. I think there are 4 possibilities for this case. 1) The police is indeed sluggish in the case by with no evil intention to frame Parti Liyani. 2) The police itself despised and had discriminatory views on the poor and vulnerable. This is also possible as I had read in another case whereby the domestic helper accused the employer of rape after being pregnant by her outside boyfriend. When the female officer read out the charge to the employer who is the accused, the employer laughed. The officer straightaway jumped onto the employer and rebuked him for taking it as a minor thing. But actually the employer laughed because he find the accusation unbelievable. Our society had deteriorated to a state whereby there is a serious class divide between the rich and the poor, the powerful and vulnerable. We must not allow this gap to widen. And I think our police officers need to be properly trained to be less emotionally swayed which could cloud their judgement. 3) There is a conspiracy between the people in high places and the police. Under the behest of the Liew Family, the police is purposely being flimsy in their actions investigations. And we must also investigate deeper to check whether this conspiracy also involved AGC and the District Judge. 4) The 4th possibility which is the slimmest is that Parti Liyani is telling lies and indeed responsible for the theft. What the final outcome might be, I need to give credit to the lawyer who seek redress for Parti Liyani and Judge Chan Seng Onn who dove the due diligence to acquit Parti Liyani. Due to the sloppy job done by the police in the investigations, we really dun know what is the actual happenings. But Judge Chan Seng Onn did the right thing to acquit Parti as there are lack of concrete evidences and many doubtful points in this case. He did the right thing not to take chances as it might throw an innocent person into undue suffering. We had full admiration for Parti lawyer and Judge Chan. They are the type of person who dare to stand up against the system, against the rich and powerful. A full investigation should be conducted and should not just end with the acquittal of Parti Liyani. Whoever find flouting the laws should be punished accordingly even if it means they are people in high places.   * Facebook post by James Kok.  Read More →

The recent saga on the acquittal of a maid, Parti Liyani, has sent shockwaves throughout the Nation on the severe state of our Justice system which is in need of urgent reforms. We have always pride ourselves, as MP Jamus Lim puts it, on efficiency and not compassion or the quest for truth. Hence, the situation we are facing now is dire and fast slipping into a scenario similar to Najib Razak’s Malaysia. I wish these issues had surfaced before the elections! Is it too late now, only the PSP and WP MPs will know? I’m unsure why people are so uptight about this case in the first place when things like that are bound to happen in a system built upon cronyism. All power leads to single source, where even the PM’s own estranged siblings are unable to hold their brother accountable. Instead, what the system does is to ransack the homes of the 2 journalist who reported extensively on it and charge them for disseminating the allegations to a larger audience. One of them I understand, is facing an extra charge of “sending an email without authorisation” from a friend who previously allowed him to write tons of articles on it. This is the real sorrowful state of the Justice system here, wake up to reality folks! Separately, just sharing what journalists of other countries report can land you a civil defamation suit which upcoming trial is on 6 Oct. We should pay attention to this crucial one, where a possible precedence could be set for the further curtailing of speech in Singapore, surrounded by a host of other such laws passed in our 1 party parliament without much challenge. The end result to all these undue actions will be paralysis in checks and balances, allowing the rulers a free rein without dissent! We could also be losing 2 of our token Opposition MPs as Judicial decisions are uncheckable ones. The decadence did not happen overnight but slowly through the years of our voting patterns for an efficient but unaccountable government. We have surrendered much of our civil liberties in exchange for efficiency which has lead us nowhere except on autopilot mode. Overseas investors are closely watching our rule of law situation and will likely not want to start-up in Singapore, if our system is similar to the one in HK. What can we do to shape our political system and how are we to emerge from here, I leave it to the imagination of fellow Singaporeans, For Country, For People!   Matt Yap        Read More →