TR EMERITUS

PM Lee in April 2011 I am extremely disappointed that PM Lee has lost the opportunity to regain some respect from citizens by showing magnanimity. It does not matter if the money he will receive from Roy through his lawsuit is donated. The end result is PM Lee will be seen as a bully. To ordinary citizens, Roy is a hero. I have written twice to PM Lee (link link) explaining the consequences and bad PR. It is strange for the PM’s adviser to shoot PM Lee in the foot. Recall PM Lee famously declaring “We are servants of the people: Lee”, “always maintain a sense of humility and service” and “never lord it over the people we are looking after and serving”. If PM Lee and PAP politicians are our servants, the relationship between us is one of servant and master. PM Lee was trying to reverse a master/servant mentality of PAP members and inspire them during the Young PAP 25th anniversary rally. Maybe the YPAP was so inspired to produce a comedy of sorts and, not being a political film, was rightly approved by the MDA. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence because “SERVANT leadership” was clearly mentioned at the start of the video. The speech was given about 3 weeks before the 2011 election. When in power after the election, all the talk about humility and service was thrown out the window. It appears our servant, PAP, has been taking legal action against their masters! Besides Roy, cartoonistLeslie Chew, blogger Alex Au and TRE editor Richard Wan have also received letters of demand from various lawyers. Even the Council of Private Education, a statutory board,  deemed it fit to throw tax dollars on a letter of demand to fix a then 21 year old student Han Hui Hui. Why does the PAP continue with an old school approach of using brute force instead of reasoning? Citizens are not so stupid and undiscerning, you know? Before every election, PAP MPs will visit their constituents with their entourage of useless grassroots members. The PAP has to be mindful that most of them have too much vested interests** and have been sucking up to their political paymasters at the expense of constituents. This appears to be one of the reasons for the huge disconnect between the PAP and citizens. In “PM Lee on how he stays positive online: I’m flameproof”, he says: “If you want to do something for Singapore, for the population, you should not be deterred because there are some nasty postings. When you are in the public eye, you flame me, I’m flameproof.” So if it’s true, why the need to take legal action against Roy’s ‘nasty’ posting? PAP political affiliates have made billions from the country. It is not right for the leader or his subordinates to pay citizens back with threats of lawsuits. The political and economic landscape have changed beyond recognition and what we find is most of our servants continue to be in dreamland. MP Inderjit Singh hit the nail on the head when he recently highlighted “the disconnect between the country’s wealth and Singaporeans’ well being” in Parliament. An increasing number of citizens have become more distrustful of a disconnected government. The government has to work harder and listen to our REAL concerns to regain our trust. PM Lee must remember his words and take them seriously. We want to continue believing that the PAP exists to serve and not threaten the people with lawsuits. The people will hold PM Lee to his words and the ball is now in his court. It’s not too late to do the right thing. ** I recently read an article on TRE where business connections between government bodies and grassroots members were also highlighted. According to the TRE article, one such member, Calvin Teo, the owner of Top Advertising Pte Ltd, has this list (below) of “prestige clients”. The conflict of interests cannot be more obvious. Phillip Ang * The author blogs at likedatosocanmeh.wordpress.com.  Read More →

PM Lee Hsien Loong PM Lee has rejected Roy's offer of $5,000 for damages and will proceed to sue him, said his lawyer Davinder Singh from Drew and Napier. Roy had earlier today made the offer through his lawyer M Ravi to PM Lee for damages with each party to bear their own legal costs. In a letter addressed to Mr Ravi [Link], Mr Singh described Roy's offer as "derisory" (ridiculously small or inadequate) and "completely disregards the gravity of of his (Roy's) conduct", and Roy's "calculated and systematic aggravation of the injury and distress" to PM Lee. Dismissing Roy's apology as insincere, Mr Singh said that Roy had an agenda and was misleading PM Lee and the public. Roy had "opportunistically" used the issue "to raise his public profile, garner support and sympathy and renew his attack" against PM Lee, Mr Singh said. Mr Singh accused Roy of going back on his undertaking to remove a video uploaded to YouTube and 4 recent articles - which were the additional conditions demanded by PM Lee [Link]. Apparently, instead of removing the video and articles as demanded by PM Lee, Roy had supposedly hidden (made private) the video and articles and then emailed international media and others telling them where to watch and read the articles. The email reportedly outlined how PM Lee was using high-handed approaches against a local blogger when all the blogger was trying to do was raise questions about how CPF is managed. ...we learnt of two emails which appear to have been sent by your client, one to many people, including members of the local and international media, and the other to a blind list. PM Lee was willing to forego a substantial amount of the aggravated damages entitled to him, but Roy had behaved dishonourably and "cynically used the occasion of his knowingly false libel to promote himself", Mr Singh continued. Mr Singh noted that Roy had not only misled PM Lee and the public, he had also "not come clean" with his lawyer M Ravi. Concluding, Mr Singh said PM Lee will proceed to sue Roy for damages. In Singapore, going by precedence, damages awarded to Prime Ministers and Ministers have in the past been in the range of $200,000 to $500,000. It is not known if vocal and supportive netizens would help Roy raise hundreds of thousands of dollars should PM Lee succeed in establishing that his reputation is worth so much.  Read More →

Boy standing next to a cut-out of Uma ParameshvariIn the latest post on Chasing Aphrodite - a famous blog dedicated to the hunt for looted antiquities in the world's museums - Singapore's Asian Civilizations Museum (ACM) is said to have bought more than US$1 million of art from disgraced Manhattan dealer Subhash Chandra Kapoor, according to business records from Kapoor’s Art of the Past gallery. Kapoor currently stands trial in India for trafficking 18 idols stolen at his request from temples in Tamil Nadu, India. He is accused of having enlisted people in India to steal the artifacts. After being stolen, they were shipped to Hong Kong, and then to him in New York. He would then create false paperwork to hide the origins of the ill-gotten artifacts. Kapoor was arrested on an Interpol warrant while travelling through Germany and extradited to India last year. According to the New York Post [Link], he was given up by his ex-lover, a Singapore art dealer named Paramaspry Punusamy, after the two split up over a dispute involving the artifacts. In a series of raids on Kapoor's Manhattan gallery and storage facilities, US authorities have seized an estimated US$100 million worth of stolen artifacts. Authorities said the evidence could unravel the biggest antiquities smuggling network identified since the 1990's. Last Decemeber, TRE broke the news that ACM possessed a a stolen idol from Tamil Nadu ('1,000-year idol stolen from India now in SG museum'). The idol was a 1,000-year bronze statue of the Hindu goddess Uma Parameshvari. It was stolen from a temple in the Ariyalur district of Tamil Nadu in 2005 or 2006 after which it was transported to the US. Kapoor then sold it to ACM for US$650,000 in February 2007. Indian newspaper The Hindu tried numerous times to contact ACM over the Uma Parameshvari idol since July last year but the museum authorities in Singapore rebuffed each attempt at extracting information. The Hindu complained: The Hindu, which has been following this case, wrote to the museum authorities in Singapore in July, enquiring about the provenance of the Uma Parameshvari sculpture. However, they did not reply. The Hindu contacted the museum again to get its response to the recent developments. Until this story went to print (6 Dec 2013), the museum did not reply to the email that followed a telephone conversation. It was only after TRE publicised this story (6 Dec) and a subsequent story (25 Dec) about another stolen Indian artifact ('ACM has another artifact with fake letter of origin') that ACM decided to come clean. On 8 January 2014, ACM issued a statement saying that it would take "all necessary steps according to international laws and practice to return any stolen or looted objects purchased from New York gallery Art of The Past". In fact, ACM revealed that it had bought 30 artifacts from Art of The Past over 14 years from 1997 to 2010. It said it was alerted to the possibility of 2 of the artifacts being illicit purchases, without naming TRE as the source of the news. Although ACM revealed that it had bought altogether 30 artifacts from Art of The Past in its statement, the museum did not name the objects, detail their provenance or disclose the price it had paid for them. The latest post (25 May) on Chasing Aphrodite [Link] now reveals that ACM paid more than US$1 million for the 30 artifacts and details each of the 30 items. For example, in October 1997, Kapoor billed ACM US$22,500 for a 3rd century limestone fragment from Amaravati, South India. “Examples from the Amaravait stuppa are extremely rare to find,” Kapoor wrote in text accompanying the sale. “This particular piece does not come from the stuppa proper, but from the outer rail copings that surrounded the stuppa. It is an exceptional example in both its size and in its illustrative qualities…The iconography of this fragment makes this a most interesting piece from the Amaravati area.” Then in February 1998, Kapoor sold ACM an 11th century sandstone crouching lion (pictured right) from Kanoj, Uttar Padesh for US$35,000 and an 11th century stone goddess Camunda from Rajshahi, Bangladesh priced at US$25,000. After a US$5,000 discount, the total invoice was for US$55,000. An Art of the Past invoice dated April 2002 shows that ACM bought 3 ancient rattles from Kapoor for US$10,000. The rattles (pictured below) depict a boy seated with ball, a seated man, and a seated man with bare belly. In any case, the total value of ACM’s 30 acquisitions from Kapoor is a cool US$1,192,881, according to Chasing Aphrodite, which says there may be additional Kapoor objects at ACM not detailed in its blog post. Chasing Aphrodite gives the following advice: Given the ACM’s extensive dealings with Kapoor, the Singapore museum should immediately release the provenance documents for all the antiquities it acquired from the dealer and proactively reach out to Indian and American investigators. Do you agree that ACM should "immediately release the provenance documents for all the antiquities it acquired from the (disgraced) dealer and proactively reach out to Indian and American investigators"? Editor's note: Chasing Aphrodite is written and maintained by Jason Felch, an award-winning investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times. Felch has written on a wide range of topics, such as arms trafficking, forensic DNA, disaster fraud, money laundering, public education and corruption in the art world.  Read More →