TR EMERITUS

I am a patriot and it gives me no pleasure to post this commentary. Our national football team's performance at the SEA Games 2023 in Cambodia has been one disappointment after another and we are on the verge of an early balek kampong. I ask what happened? Decades ago it was Goh CT and his pipe dream of Singapore qualifying for the World Cup on the back of new citizen players and today it's Edwin Tong and his seductive rhetorical lalala...In between there was a former pap mp and mayor, Zainudin Nordin who helmed the Football Association of Singapore, so, what happened? I guess both Goh CT and Edwin Tong could suck thumb while watching our team played in Cambodia but I want them to understand by heart that football is a physically challenging sport and not some clever or rhetorical talking endeavour like debate or making a parliamentary speech sort of stuff which they are very good at. I have been sort of following our football team's performance over the years and my conclusion is that when big name and clever talking politicians with almost no intimate knowledge about the sport got involved with the leadership aspect of the game, the coffin nail of that sport is as good as nailed. Over the decades, our national football performance and standards are very good examples. Football championship is never ever won with merely the association with big name politicians or by clever talking only. Never! Think.   Simon Lim      Read More →

One of the things that we, as a nation, like to tell the world, is the fact that Singapore is very firm when it comes to the rule of law. It’s supposed to be the one thing that makes us stand out whenever we are compared with our rivals in the region. I remember, then Deputy Prime Minister, Teo Chee Hean, making that point in 2013 when he was asked about Singapore’s higher costs when compared to the rest of the region. He said, “There may be hidden costs in the region but Singapore, what you see is what you get.” This has been, what you’d call our key strengths when it comes to selling ourselves in the world. When it comes to the world of foreign investment, you’ll find that whilst the multinationals want to be in the bigger markets, they make a point of ensuring that contracts get signed under Singapore Law, because, well our legal system is that well regarded. However, within the first third of this year, there’s been plenty of reason for us to question if we’re really a place of “what you see if what you get.” First, there was the fact that six-senior executives at Keppel O&M were let off with a “stern warning” by our Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) for allegations of corruption in Brazil, despite the company’s US arm entering into a plea deal in the USA. There was a decision not to name the six and our second Minister of Finance, Ms. Indranee Rajah got up in parliament and defended the decision of the CPIB not to prosecute the six because of a “lack of evidence,” despite what the international media was reporting. More recently, there was the case of Mr. Karl Liew, son of former Changi Airport Chairman, Mr. Liew Mun Leong, who was jailed for two weeks for lying first to the police and then under oath in court in an effort to frame the family maid for theft. What makes Mr. Liew’s case particularly interesting was the fact that he only got jail time because the judge would not accept the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) acting like it was Mr. Liew’s defense counsel. A lot has been written about these two matters and not much more can be said, except that as far as the ordinary member of the public is concerned, the belief that the system protects its own is confirmed. To an extent, most of us have always understood that there’s always been some form on back scratching in Singapore. When we talked of “non-corruption” we were right in the sense that people like immigration officers and traffic policemen would not take bribes. In Singapore, if you get a speeding ticket, you pay the speeding ticket and not the traffic cop who issued it. However, we accepted that there would always be certain people who get treated a little nicer because they happened to be born who they were. However, it was usually done within the boundaries of legality and even the most favoured of people knew that they had to be seen playing by the rules. Our first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew made it very clear that the “whiff” of corruption, let alone the actual corruption would not be tolerated. Sure, he saw to it that “his people,” like his ministers were well paid but should there be a hint that they were not playing by the rules, he’d deal with them in the most severe manner. We’re talking about a man who gave a minister accused of corruption the choice of suicide or being ruined. The minister in question realized that suicide was the better option. His successor, Mr. Goh Chok Tong, offered a “kinder, gentler” Singapore and made efforts to reduce some of the elder Mr. Lee’s more brutal methods when doing things. However, Mr. Goh realized that any hint of corruption or fraud was to be avoided like the plague. Take what happened when Mr. TT Durai, CEO of the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) was found to have been very generous with himself with the funds of the charity. Mr. Durai who had been CEO of the NKF since 1992 was something of a star who raised funds for the public and offered affordable dialysis treatments. The government seemed to like him for finding a way to keep a potential health problem off the government’s bill. However, when word of Mr. Durai’s misdeeds came out, the government came out, the government worked to distance itself from him. Mr. Goh’s wife who had publicly defended Mr. Durai’s generous salary as “Peanuts” faced a public backlash and vanished from the spotlight. Mr. Goh, who had just handed over the premiership apologized for his wife. As for Mr. Durai, he quickly and quietly surrendered and ended up facing three months in jail. He was also sued by the organization he had once led and after he was released, he disappeared from the public eye. [LINK] Sure, Mr. Durai’s three months in jail might seem light compared to the amount he took from the NKF’s coffers. However, with the exception of Mrs. Goh (who has never held public office), no prominent figures tried to defend him and whilst the justice system may not have dealt him a harsh blow, he was named and shamed. Compare that with what happened with the six at Keppel O&M and Mr. Karl Liew. Not only was there a visible effort to “protect” the accused parties but there was also an effort to “explain” why the crime wasn’t actually a crime. In the case of the Keppel Six, there was the ridiculous defense launched by the Artful Bootlicker, who calls himself the Critical Spectator. According to the Critical Spectator, the Six at Keppel should have been given an award for making Keppel and by extension the rest of us rich out of Brazil’s corruption. Then there’s a case of Mr. Karl Liew, whom most normal people might suggest committed the text book definition of perjury. However, instead of charging him for perjury, he was charged with giving false evidence to a public official, which carries a significantly lesser sentence. Why would the AGC do this? Well, a few days after Mr. Liew got sentenced, we had a nice article in the Today Newspaper from a former Deputy Public Prosecutor explaining to us that “wrong evidence was not necessarily false evidence.” [LINK] I can’t for the life of me remember anyone trying to explain in the public domain how Mr. Durai’s acts of fraud were not actually fraud the way there’s an offer to explain why Mr. Liew’s perjury is not actually perjury. We always knew that certain people would be anointed. However, back then, it being anointed meant that you had to play within the rules. It would seem that in today’s world, anointment means that you play by separate rules. Surely this is not something you expect from a country that tells you that “what you see is what you get.”   Tang Li *Although I’ve been based mainly in Singapore for nearly two decades, I’ve had the privilege of being able to 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 →

Tan Chuan-Jin Recently I tweeted about how Georgians in large numbers had protested against their pro-Russian government’s attempt to introduce a bill requiring NGOs and media receiving more than 20% foreign funding to register as “foreign agents” and be subject to restrictions. The BBC report said that the proposed law was modelled on a similar law introduced in 2012 in Russia. However the model could equally well be Singapore’s Foreign Interference and Countermeasures Act (FICA) which in turn undoubtedly drew inspiration from Russia’s law. A few days later I read that Georgia’s government had withdrawn the proposed legislation after huge street protests though the Opposition there had told their supporters not to relax yet as the government would likely try to reintroduce the legislation or something similar by a different route. Of course Singaporeans have never had an independent media since LKY shut down the Singapore Herald and the Eastern Sun in the early 1970s and introduced the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act. The Broadcasting Act similarly gave the government a monopoly of TV and radio and made it an offence to receive foreign broadcasts via a private satellite dish. All media are state media, which is itself a misnomer since all editors and journalists can be hired and fired at the whim of the PAP, which, unlike the Chinese or Soviet Communist Parties, is solely the vehicle of one man and one family, a microcosm of the country which is just a family business. To use state resources to ensure favourable, indeed hagiographic, media coverage and to denigrate, belittle or destroy your opponents so you can stay in office and your wife or relatives can continue to enrich themselves on secret remuneration packages is by definition corrupt and has led to prosecutions in several countries with greater checks and balances than Singapore. The trillion dollar question (or $3 trillion question to use my likely extremely accurate estimate of the reserves is why Singaporeans put up with it. As I have shown, every year the Budget is stuffed full of fake spending and tricks to divert Singaporeans’ money into the reserves. Apart from the wholly exceptional year of 2020, the Government takes more from Singaporeans than it gives to the tune of $30 billion or so a year. And that is before gains by Temasek, GIC, MAS and the host of other opaque state owned companies. Unfortunately the quiescence of Singaporeans is mirrored by that of the Opposition MPs they choose to represent them. In this year’s Budget round-up speeches, supposedly neutral but of course PAP Speaker Tan Chuan-Jin praised the Budget debate for being “relatively genteel and civilised” while Indranee regurgitated the usual PAP claptrap about avoiding populism and “the politics of division”. Singaporeans should not be fooled. If the PAP are praising the Opposition for being genteel and civilised it means the Opposition are not doing their job. JBJ was never genteel and civilised. He never shied away from asking hard questions, like the current crop of WP MPs do. I remember him saying, after the PAP appointed him to a committee dealing with the comfort of members that he had been very bad at looking after the comfort of members, all of whom apart from him were PAP at that time. The proof that JBJ did his job well was LHL’s t attack on him in the insulting condolence letter he wrote to my brother and me, accusing JBJ of seeking “by all means to demolish the PAP and our system of government. Unfortunately, this helped neither to build up a constructive opposition nor our Parliamentary tradition” Now we have an Opposition that pride themselves on being “constructive” and seem to want the PAP and LHL’s dynasty to stay in power forever. When the PAP Speaker and the Leader of the House praise the Opposition for being genteel and civilised what they really mean is that the Government has achieved its objective of not being forced to answer any difficult questions or give away any important information, let alone spend more of what should be a mountain of cash on improving peoples’ lives. When we have a Parliamentary Opposition that is intimidated by the PAP and fears losing their exceedingly generous tax-free MPs’ allowances, one that does not want to fulfil the constitutional role of an Opposition within a democracy and hold the Government accountable, that is when Singaporeans get a bad deal. The amount of the reserves goes unchallenged and the PAP get away with inflating the total spending figures in the Budget and diverting them into the reserves through a variety of dirty tricks. LHL’s and Lawrence Wong’s unproven assertions that Singaporeans need to pay more tax go unchallenged or the Opposition go to great lengths to prove that revenue can be raised by other sources, thus validating the PAP paradigm that state resources are almost exhausted due to the demands of feckless and greedy citizens who dare to fall ill or grow old. To take just one example of how ineffectual our Opposition is, it was not until I told Sylvia Lim and Pritam Singh that they should ask a question about Ho Ching’s salary that the WP plucked up courage to do so. Sylvia Lim even tried to argue with me that it was disclosed in the Temasek Holdings Annual Review. Even then they failed to ask a direct question instead asking what the remuneration of the top three management was. They were far too easily fobbed off with contempt by Lawrence Wong who said that Temasek was a private company and having done what they felt was their duty promptly sat down and have not raised the issue since. WP have accepted the role that Indranee outlined for them in her speech, of “reflecting genuine ground concerns”, nothing more. Singaporeans need to be less genteel and civilised and more like Georgians in demanding the truth from their Government and refusing to put up with repressive laws designed to entrench the PAP in power. and keep their leaders, spouses and relatives monopolising the top jobs and paying themselves billions while lying to the people about the resources available. I promise that if elected to Parliament I will, like my father, be neither genteel nor civilised but instead be dogged in pursuit of the truth, no matter the cost.   Kenneth Jeyaretnam   About the author: I’m a Singaporean economist who became an opposition activist. I blog to provide an alternative to the porkies that the Pinkies tell. It just so happens that my alternative is the truth. That’s why I’ve never been sued in any civil or criminal court no matter how hard hitting my criticism. I’m quoted and interviewed and asked to speak across the world but largely censored in Singapore in an effort to silence my political opinions. The left hate me because they think I split their vote and because I eschew their outmoded economic models. Models that don’t work. The Right and the Conservatives hate me because I’m a liberal. I’m not sure what the middle think of me. I don’t think there are more than a handful of people in the middle, here in Singapore. I’m a Singaporean born and bred, dual heritage, my parents Singaporean established here before the State of Singapore was created. I’m not Eurasian. I read economics at Cambridge and could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school but I believe in interventions. I was formerly a successful hedge fund manager. After economics and politics my greatest interests are history, film and Makan. I run but I run so I can eat like a Singaporean.      Read More →