Today state media mouthpiece, Asiaone, funded with your hardearned money but working round the clock to re-elect the PAP and ensure their continued access to inflated state salaries for them and their spouses and relatives, carried a report about how a police officer at the inquest into the suicide of Ms Gena Ong Kay Yong, laid the blame squarely on the notorious anti-vaxxers Raymond Ng and Iris Koh. According to the report:

“Insp Kuan said Ms Ong formed the view that Mr Ng and “IK”, later established to be referring to Iris Koh, who is Mr Ng’s wife, were targeting innocent, average Singaporeans who would be easily threatened and intimidated by suing them so they could get money.

Ms Ong added that she could not afford the lawsuits and experienced health problems such as hair loss, nervous tics, blurred vision, failing memory and numbness in her limbs. But because of her legal woes, she could not afford to see a doctor, she said.

According to Insp Kuan, Mr Ng initiated a total of four court proceedings against Ms Ong from August 2021 till her death, including two for defamation and one for harassment.

However the report failed to give credit where it’s due. In particular it of course failed to mention PAP Ministers, and in particular Lee Kuan Yew, who were the innovators and used this strategy against their opponents to such chilling effect.

Of course the most glaring example of the use of this strategy was against my father JBJ who, in addition to being deprived of his Parliamentary seat on fake charges that were later deemed to be “a grievous miscarriage of justice” by the Privy Council who were unfortunately powerless to restore him to his seat, was sued repeatedly by LKY and other Ministers, MPs and PAP hangers-on, in particular the so-called Tamil “worthies”, till he was stripped of everything and made homeless. In his last years he was reduced to living in cheap hotels and, with a serious heart condition, travelling to JB to stay at his late parents’ bungalow at weekends till I provided him with a place to live, where he sadly passed away in 2008. It was undoubtedly only his deep Christian faith which prevented him from giving up and being driven to suicide like the poor woman in the report.

After he was re-elected to an NCMP seat in 1997 eleven separate defamation suits were filed against my father by Goh Chok Tong, LKY, LHL, Tony Tan and others. This was in addition to the huge and totally unjustified damages awarded to Jayakumar and the Tamil worthies, which should have also been paid by Low Thia Kiang and the WP but were mysteriously levied only against JBJ. The aim was to bankrupt him and force him out of Parliament so the PAP could escape accountability. The Asiaone report mentions that Raymond Ng declined mediation when it was offered choosing instead to continue applying maximum psychological pressure against a vulnerable person. The PAP Ministers used the same tactics of refusing to consolidate lawsuits to rack up unreasonable costs. My father went to beg one of the Tamil worthies to allow a longer payment schedule but he told me she declined, saying that she was being directed by people high up in the PAP and her hands were tied.

The same tactics were used against a host of Opposition figures including Tang Liang Hong, who stood with my father in Cheng San in 1997 and whose police reports against Goh Chok Tong and ten other PAP Ministers, provided a convenient opening for the PAP Ministers to sue my father and drive him into bankruptcy with lawsuits that would be considered absurd and vexatious in any democracy. Simple statistical analysis of the damages awarded in defamation suits brought by members of the PAP Government compared with damages awarded by judges in suits brought by ordinary members of the public have shown they are several orders of magnitude greater which cannot be explained by other factors. Defamation suits continue to be used to this day against people like Roy Ngerng, a penniless blogger and gay health worker who was sacked from his job for defaming LHL and driven into exile in Taiwan, and Terry Xu, editor of. TOC. I have also been threatened with a defamation suit by a foreign company employing Shanmugam’s son. Recently Lee Hsien Yang had to pay a sum in excess of $600,000 to Shanmugam and Vivian Balakrishnan despite the Ministers failing to show that they had suffered any economic loss.

While state media rightly report on the police officer’s evidence that Raymond Ng’s harassment with defamation suits brought about Ms Ong’s suicide, they of course fail to give credit where it’s due and mention that it was the PAP who invented and perfected this strategy, starting with LKY.

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