20 February 2014

An Open Letter to the Minister for Finance

Mr. Tharman Shanmuguratnam
Ministry of Finance
100 High Street
#10-01 The Treasury
Singapore 179434

Dear Minister,

You recently called in the Auditor-General to audit the accounts of Aljunied- Hougang – Punggol East Town Council (AHPETC) because the auditor’s reports raised serious questions about the reliability and accuracy of the town council’s financial and accounting systems. The report raised equally serious concerns over alleged discrepancies in the accounts of the former PAP-run Aljunied Town Council. At issue is the sum of 1.12 million dollars, which the former Aljunied Town Council had recorded as a receivable  due from the Citizens Consultative Committees for improvement projects and whose validity has now been denied by both the Ministry for National Development (MND) and HDB.

I would remind you that the Reform Party, in its budget analysis for 2012 and 2013 and my open letters to you and to Christine Lagarde, has repeatedly raised serious questions about discrepancies and missing information in the way you present the Budget and the picture therein of the government’s finances.  In particular the Statement of Assets and Liabilities does not match with the total returns that Temasek and GRC claim to have earned since inception and the revenues earned from the sale of land.

We have repeatedly asked you for an explanation for these discrepancies and to supply the missing information. I therefore have great sympathy with my colleagues in the Workers Party who say that they have been unable to get data from government bodies for an item in the accounts run by the former PAP town council.

My experience has also been that lack of transparency and freedom of information makes obtaining critical data an impossibility.

May I remind you that the Auditor-General’s report for the financial year 2011/2012 given to the President and publicly available since July 2012 contained an item under the heading Ministry of Finance, “Presidents concurrence not obtained for promissory note issued.”  

 In short your Ministry had been found to have breached the Constitution and unlawfully granted a loan using taxpayers’ money to the International Development Association, the soft lending arm of the World Bank without obtaining the President’s approval as required under Article 144. The promissory note had to be returned and reissued in order for your Ministry to comply with the law. We were not informed what had happened to the monies the IDA had already drawn down. A junior civil servant was blamed and your ministry promised to put new procedures in place. I would ask you to let our taxpayers know what those new procedures and checks and balances are so that we can have confidence that the controls in your Ministry are sufficiently robust, reliable and accurate.
I believe your recent address to Parliament on 21 January 2014 when introducing a motion for increasing Singapore’s capital contribution to the IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) raises further cause for concern over the reliability of your Ministry’s accounting treatments.

In Parliament you describe an accounting treatment for the above IBRD capital contribution which if correct renders  the treatment that you argued in court last year,  applied to Singapore’s loan commitment to the IMF false.  (in Civil Appeal No. 154 of 2012 (Jeyaretnam Kenneth Andrew.)

In court I argued that the IMF loan commitment was a liability and therefore caught by Article 144(1) of the Constitution and you argued at that time, that it was an asset and therefore not caught by 144(1). The judges accepted your version that it was an asset and therefore 144(1) did not apply and I lost my case.

I am writing to you to ask you to explain how you could now give a description in Parliament for a similar scenario, where Singapore is agreeing to provide callable capital to the IBRD on demand, explaining that this represents a liability not an asset.

The two bilateral pledge agreements are in fact very similar structures and therefore you cannot at the same time argue that one is accounted for as an asset and the other as a liability.

If I may refresh your memory the Hansard record for the IBRD motion records you as stating:

“The remaining 94% (of Singapore’s subscription), known as callable capital, will not be drawn by the IBRD except in extreme circumstances, when it cannot meet its obligations on borrowings or guarantees.  To date, the IBRD has never had to call on the callable capital.  It is an AAA-rated institution with a sound balance sheet for over 50 years.  Nevertheless, the full increase in Singapore’s subscription to IBRD’s capital will be charged to the Consolidated Fund, as the callable capital represents an increase in the Government’s financial liabilities. “

I thank you for pointing out to our people that no matter what impeccable history a AAA rated institution has, there can be no categorical case for stating that the callable capital will NOT be in fact called upon. In fact as you will be aware supranational financial institutions, such as the IBRD and the IMF, are awarded their AAA rating and quasi-sovereign status precisely because their member countries, including Singapore, guarantee to bail them out.

I refer you instead to the sentence in italics in which you agree with my previous arguments that a callable capital subscription of this nature represents an increase in the financial liabilities of the Government. In lay terms callable capital is callable- however unlikely- and therefore must be written down in our balance sheets in the Liabilities column not the Assets column.

At the time when it is finally called upon it then swops sides and becomes an asset though you have chosen to write down its value to zero. We are agreed on this – that an actual loan or called upon capital commitment must be listed as an asset. Our subscriptions to the IBRD give Singapore voting rights and allow us to influence policy and thus qualify as assets. I agree that until such time as our commitment is called upon it should be defined as a liability.

This is in fact exactly what I argued in court re the IMF.  You argued the opposite.

Your different explanations on two separate occasions now make you vulnerable to accusations of contradicting yourself or even knowingly misleading the court by presenting two opposing descriptions for the same thing. The only way you can avoid such accusations would be to argue that a loan commitment to the IMF is qualitatively different from a callable capital subscription to the IBRD. However nonsensical that argument would be.
Nonsensical maybe but it does not surprise me that Hansard shows that in the very next sentence you do indeed bravely attempt to defend the indefensible, namely to argue a distinction between the callable capital of the IBRD and that of the IMF. You do this by saying the IBRD subscriptions are ‘unlike’ our loan commitments to the IMF.  It is deeply significant that this reference to the IMF loan commitment is missing from your Ministry’s Press release. And it can only be found by scrutinizing Hansard.  Presumably you would not wish to widely publicize this explanation, not only because it is bunkum but also because it contradicts your previous statements in court and in Parliament.

Let us look at your exact words to Parliament and our people:

“Our subscriptions to the IBRD are hence unlike MAS’ subscriptions to the IMF’s capital, or what is called the “IMF quota subscriptions”, or its loans to the IMF, which are neither expenditures nor liabilities, but assets that remain part of our Official Foreign Reserves.”

In fact Minister you are being economical with the truth and attempting to mislead the people by lumping the commitment to make a loan to the IMF with the loan itself or with an increase in Singapore’s capital subscriptions to the IMF. Here are the three descriptions that you use to describe financial resources provided to the IMF that you run together in the above sentence:

1.”MAS’s subscriptions to the IMF’s capital”

2. “IMF quota subscriptions”

3. “Loans to the IMF.” 

No. 1  is a contingent liability until it is called then it becomes an asset.  

No. 2 is a different way of describing  No. 1

Once they are made, actual loans to the IMF (No. 3) are treated for accounting purposes as assets (though in line with US Budget practice a reserve should be taken against the risk of loss and the fact that they may never be repaid) but so long as the IMF loan commitment remains undrawn it represents a contingent liability for the government, whether when it is drawn it represents a loan or becomes an increase in Singapore’s capital subscription to the IMF.

This can be further demonstrated by examining your answer to a Parliamentary question on 12 May 2012:

“5   These are however temporary resources, provided to the IMF in advance of the expected increase in its permanent capital subscriptions (or quota subscriptions) that will be decided in early 2014.  Participating in the current round of bilateral contributions to the IMF will in effect bring forward part or all of Singapore’s likely share of the increase in the IMF’s capital base in 2014. [my italics]

 6   Singapore’s US$4 billion contingent line of credit to the IMF means that Singapore is expected to lend the funds when the IMF considers necessary.”

Your argument in court that the IMF loan commitment is an asset is furthermore contradicted by MAS’s own accounts for 2012-13. The accounts show our republic’s obligations to the IMF under Commitments, which includes other contingent liabilities such as capital expenditures, leases and a guarantee to Singapore Deposit Insurance Corporation in the amount of $20 billion.

Even you must be aware that a commitment to lend money to the IMF carries risks, however negligible you want the people of Singapore to think these are.

As the Finance Minister and head of the International Financial and Monetary Committee of the IMF, who regularly meets with the US Treasury Secretary, you will know that the US treats commitments to the IMF as contingent liabilities requiring approval by Congress (see here). Furthermore as required under the US Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990 loans made by the US Government are scored to reflect the degree of subsidy or risk of loss. In 2009 the US Congress appropriated US$5 billion to cover the risk of loss on the US commitment to the IMF.

Would you not agree that the government should establish a similar reserve in respect both of our subscriptions (whether called or not) and our loans (whether made or commitments)?

If the IMF loan commitment increases the financial liabilities of the Government  (including within the Government the assets and liabilities of the MAS as defined by Article 142 of the Constitution) then you have clearly breached Article 144(1). This follows from former AG Chan Sek Kheong’s opinion in 1998 that “transactions captured by Article 144(1) are those that, logically, increase the financial liability of the Government.”

 There can therefore be no doubt that our loan commitment to the IMF should have received Parliamentary and Presidential approval. It further follows that by representing a liability as an asset to the Appeal Court you led the Court to rule that it was an asset and to dismiss my appeal.

Whilst you may use sophistry and a constitution re-written by the PAP government to be so vague as to be unfit for purpose and hoodwink our people – it will not pass on a global stage. Already our republic’s banking secrecy laws are bringing us under increasing pressure to comply with global money laundering regulations. We have become known as a haven for dirty money. Our love of accepting ultra rich individuals and large institutions that take advantage of our low tax regime and preferential treatment for non-citizens is also under fire.

As the budget is due to be presented tomorrow, I would hope recent events will persuade you to set out Budget 2014 in an internationally accepted and transparent format as prescribed by IMF and not the deceptive and incomplete format that your Ministry presented in 2013 and in previous years.

Yours faithfully,

Kenneth Jeyaretnam

Secretary General

Published by kjeyaretnam

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. View all posts by kjeyaretnam