Two days ago Shanmugam put up a post on Facebook announcing that he and Balakrishnan intended to sue Lee Hsien Yang for defamation over his post on Ridout Road and also demanding an apology and the payment of substantial damages.

What senior political figure of a modern developed nation fights his political battles or sends his pre- action letters via a social media app? Is this abnormal behaviour? Trump did this of course and he was a laughing stock and quite frequently appeared deranged. I’m reminded of what Hillary Clinton said: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not one we can trust with nuclear weapons.” Sure, we don’t have nuclear weapons but you get my point. We’ve been subjected to the unedifying spectacle of Shanmugam shaking with faux outrage so many times now that I’m not sure I would trust him with proper cutlery.

Since both Balakrishnan and Shanmugam have been cleared by CPIB and their colleague, Teo Chee Hean’s report and remain in post as Ministers, drawing multi-million dollar salaries and in residence at their Ridout Road mansions, paying exceedingly low rents compared to the regular private sector, I’d like to see them prove that they have suffered financial loss. All we can see is an increase in arrogance and sense of entitlement. Don’t tell me that there was a debate in parliament. Leong Mun Wai was told to stop talking by a Deputy Speaker who has been found guilty of misconduct by a Law Society tribunal and is appealing. The Speaker, as we now know, resigned in February, but apparently only to the PM, who accepted it but allowed him to remain in post drawing his very high salary to suit his partisan political interests and not Parliament’s or the country’s.

The Ministers’ threatened suits have only one purpose: to intimidate Singaporeans, to stop us from asking questions in an effort to stop us exposing the PAP’s dirty linen in public. The Economist Magazine recently compared the actions of repression to a game of Whack-a-Mole. We’re a laughing stock.

Since we have no Freedom of Information Act in Singapore that would allow us to ascertain and access facts for ourselves and since I have been prevented from bringing court action against the government to get at those facts and since the PAP chooses to keep all information from its citizens, including the size of the reserves and the total compensation paid to the PM’s wife, we have no alternative but to keep asking questions and demanding answers.

If Balakrishnan and Shanmugam were sincere about defending their reputations rather than shutting down criticism and making people keep quiet about potential conflicts and abuses of power, then they would not ask for damages only their legal costs. Trying to bankrupt their critics and emasculate the Opposition shows nothing has changed since JBJ’s day.

In fact things have got worse. When the Government passed POFMA they justified it by saying that it was to combat wild conspiracy theories, foreign manipulation in domestic politics and harmful disinformation which can cost lives such as that put out by anti vaxxers. I expected at the very least that the Government would provide the facts in order to refute the allegedly false information. But that hasn’t been the case.

When there was speculation about Ho Ching’s salary being around US$100 million a year, Heng Swee Keat fired off a succession of Correction Notices saying that the salary amount was false but failing to tell us what Ho Ching was paid. The human brain has developed to fill in gaps to join the dots. It’s how we survived and evolved. If Ministers create an information gap then it is natural that Singaporeans will attempt to fill that gap. Me, saying that Ho Ching most likely earns $101 million is me filling a gap they created. The solution is not to POFMA anyone trying to calculate her earnings. The solution is to let us know how much she is paid.

Also POFMA is totally one-sided as the Government and its Ministers and our media cannot be pulled up for spreading lies and misinformation. I called for POFMAs for Heng Swee Keat and Tin Pei Ling over their fake assertions about the level of government support for Singaporeans in Budget 2020.

I’m particularly concerned that POFMA is now being used in a kind of combined operation like a military pincer movement to make it easier for Ministers to win defamation suits. In particular, is Shanmugam using the power of his own Ministry to issue Correction Notices which could give him an unfair advantage by prejudging cases in which he has a direct financial interest. The corrections on Factually.sg go well beyond what was said in the original post and attempt to draw inferences or insinuations that are not there.

LHY has refused to back down. See his post at the end. There can’t be any argument that as he says, “Two Ministers have leased state owned mansions from the agency that one of them controls.” That is enough. Shame on them.

By playing whack-a-mole and wasting money on having me surveilled by ISD in Nee Soon, Shanmugam isn’t in fact quashing public curiosity – he’s just pushing it underground. The Government’s answers have not satisfactorily explained the issues that Singaporeans are still concerned about. There are still too many gaps in the information.

Above all else one fact stands out as an irrefutable truth. SLA stewardship and management of the land and the associated properties has been appalling. An agency that Shanmugam controls. An agency for which he personally appointed the CEO. There is no denying it. If I had managed a fund under my control this badly, I would have been fired.

One of the more disturbing aspects of Shanmugam’s outpourings of rage and fury and repression of free speech is that it prevents a proper debate on how SLA manages our land. We need a national conversation about a critical matter that will affect our children and our children’s children. We can’t have that conversation with half of the most engaged speakers and minds silenced.

I am sure the buildings and the land can be used to be benefit all Singaporeans. I am sure groups of Singaporeans could have banded together to pay more than Shanmugam and Balakrishnan were paying for a kind of timeshare or they could have been rented out to residents in our communities. Other countries with historic buildings and land manage them better in a way that maintains the heritage for future generations, contributes to their cultural space and also brings in revenue and income to benefit the citizens. I’m thinking of English Heritage in the UK and Pousadas in Portugal.

Though Shanmugam has been cleared by CPIB and his colleague Teo of any wrongdoing he cannot get away from the fact that as ultimate head of SLA he has been an extraordinarily bad steward of our land and our reserves.

The Ministers say on Facebook that they will donate any damages awarded to charity. Again this is straight from the playbook that Ministers including LKY, Goh Chok Tong and the Tamil (Un) Worthies used when they sued my father, as though this makes using Ministerial clout while in office to sue ordinary citizens somehow okay. It also surely destroys their argument for damages since the whole idea of damages for defamation is to compensate the wronged party for any financial loss suffered as a result of damage to your reputation.

I am also reminded in the way Factually is going well beyond what was actually said, how similar this is to what the appeal judges did when PM Goh sued my father in 1998 for merely holding up a police report that Tang Liang Hong had made and announcing it to the crowd. The first judge had found no damage to Goh’s reputation, merely saying JBJ was “reckless” and only awarded Goh $20,000. However the Court of Appeal went well beyond that and found “malice”, allowing them to up the damages to $100,000 an amount that together with the ludicrous shenanigans of the Tamil “Worthies” succeeded in the PAP’s objective of bankrupting my father and removing him from Parliament.

LHY has said that Shanmugam and Balakrishnan should sue him in the UK since that was where his post was made, something they are unlikely to do as they are unlikely to win damages and it would expose them to even more international ridicule. Serving Ministers in the UK cannot sue for defamation by convention since it would conflict with their duties and expose them to charges of having exploited their political power.

The last such case was that of Jonathan Aitken who stood down to sue the Guardian newspaper over claims that his stay at the Paris Ritz had been paid for by an Arab arms dealer when he was Minister for Defence Procurement. The case collapsed when he was shown to have lied. Aitken went to jail for 18 months for perjury.

Forcing PAP Ministers to sue in a different jurisdiction doesn’t appear to be a course of action open to many Singaporeans. Meanwhile I’m extremely concerned that POFMA is being perverted from the Government’s original rationale to being a tool to help Ministers suing for defamation by going beyond the ordinary meaning of the words and imputing meanings that weren’t there.

Singapore’s judges, with rare exceptions like Rajendran, have historically accepted whatever the claimant’s lawyers say, awarding much greater damages than awarded in cases involving non-ministers. In November 2020 a parliamentary rule prohibiting the discussion of matter before the courts had to be lifted in order to allow a debate on the case of the maid Parti Liyani case. I don’t understand how Shanmugam can use Parliament to announce his intention to take action, presumably litigation, then post on social media that intention , have a Correction Notice issued by his own ministry and then instigate a civil defamation suit all whilst serving as a minister without this being sub judice?

What’s clear is that the electorate’s eyes have been opened by the succession of scandals and disclosures about Ministers living luxury lifestyles in state mansions, resigning and keeping it quiet, having affairs with the. colleagues they are supposed to preside over, keeping that secret for years. With Iswaran and Chris de Souza’s cases in the pipeline the Government has determined that the solution is to instill sufficient fear in Singaporeans that they will just keep quiet and never investigate or ask questions. This reckless failure to provide transparency and accountability is making us a laughing stock. It is your duty as a citizen to stop this from happening.

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