It’s often said that you can tell the nature and quality of
a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable and I’m glad to say that
Singapore’s High Court proved Singapore’s value as a society on 4 September
2020 when it acquitted Ms. Parti Liyani, an Indonesian maid who had been accused
of theft and had previously served sometime in jail. Ms. Liyani was the maid of
Mr. Liew Mun Leong, Chairman of Changi Airport and one of Singapore’s most
prominent businessmen.
The facts leading to her acquittal can be found in the
written judgement by Justice Chan Seng Onn at:
https://www.supremecourt.gov.sg/docs/default-source/module-document/judgement/-2020-sghc-187-pdf.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3V7PRkM0gLerbuA36cLiAt_rsmPavCCwqGgx-2SKU7Dznw5OxN9Hr6jvY
In many ways the judgement reads like the plot of a Korean
Drama and exposes Singapore’s institutions as being, well pliable to the whims
of the rich and powerful. The police in particular come out looking exceedingly
bad. One of the most obvious points recorded in the judgement is the fact that
the police allowed the Liew family to use items in the boxes where some of the
allegedly stolen items were kept. If you have watched enough shows on TV, you’ll
know that this is clearly wrong.
Then there was the fact that Ms. Liyani, who is not
conversant in English (one of the reasons why Indonesian maids are paid less
than their Filipina counterparts) was questioned in – English and that was
translated for her in Bahasa Melayu when her native language is Bahasa
Indonesia. While Malay and Indonesian are similar, there are significant
differences in the mean of various words – significant enough for misunderstandings
to occur in legal situations. Nobody bothered to inform Ms. Liyani that she had
the right to have a Bahasa Indonesia interpreter present.
Then there’s the role of Mr. Liew Mun Leong and his family
and that is perhaps the biggest tragedy. Mr. Liew was once one of Singapore’s
most respected businessmen. In many ways, he’s what you’d call the type of
business hero that Singapore needs. While his is not quite the rags to riches
story, he didn’t come from an elite school (Queenstown Technical) and he worked
his way up. He is one of those very rare creatures. A Former civil servant who
succeeded in the private sector and it’s not just Singapore that recognised his
achievements. On 12 September 2017, Mr. Liew was conferred the rank of Knight
in the French Legion of Honour (Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur) for his
contributions to the French economy. More can be found at:
https://sg.ambafrance.org/Changi-Airport-Group-Chairman-Mr-Liew-Mun-Leong-awarded-with-the-Legion-of
Yet, when you read the efforts that he went through with his
family to effectively stiff a maid earning something like $300 to $600 a month (Ms.
Liyani started out on $300 a month and they doubled her pay towards the end of
her service), one can’t help but feel that Mr. Liew has shown himself to be
nothing more than a power hungry ghoul and you’re left wondering if Mr. Liew’s previous
achievements were really due to anything more than the ability to peddle influence?
One of the most
striking points against Mr. Liew is the fact that he got his maid to work for
his son in addition to himself (she had to clean his house, his son’s house and
office). This is against the rules, though there are families who get around
this by compensating the maid. Well, to be fair to Mr. Liew, he did compensate
her to the princely sum of a few bucks a month, which he allegedly took his
time to pay.
Mr. Liew is not the only businessman who has proven to be an
arsehole. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were notoriously temperamental bosses and
both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have been known to be jerks. However, while these
men may have been difficult to work with, there is no record of any of them
going all out to destroy someone so much lower on the proverbial social scale.
At one stage, Mr. Liew was making around $5,000,000 a year.
In 2007, his bonus was over S$20 million. A summary of where Mr. Liew ranks of
the pay scale can be found at:
http://www.sandboxadvisors.com/singapore-jobs-news/ceo-salary-singapore
If you read the judgement, you’ll realise that the Liew
family put in quite a bit of effort to get Ms. Liyani locked up. Think about
it, a man who helms big companies and earns at least $5,000,000 a year went out
of his way to “fix” a maid earning $7,200 a year (based on Ms. Liyani’s maximum
salary of $600 a month).
I stress that Ms. Liyani should not have gotten free pass if
she had stolen things. However, based on the evidence as laid out in the
judgement (this is a court judgement not an editorial piece), it is very clear
that the Liew family conspired to frame a maid who had served them loyally for
nine-years (she was accused of stealing a DVD player that didn’t work).
What makes this worrying is that once the verdict came out
and Ms. Liyani was acquitted, the powers that be proceeded to rush to defend
Mr. Liew. One of the worst defenses came from that bastion of business
transparency – Temasek Holdings, which bleated on about how Mr. Liew had
contributed so much and the public should hear his side of the story. The
report can be found at:
https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/cag-chairman-liew-mun-leong-has-contributed-spore-public-should-hear-his-side-story
Not to be outdone, the government lead by it’s least
conflicted minister, Mr. K Shanmugaratnam (Minister for Law and Home Affairs –
somehow there’s no conflict between the law maker and the law enforcer) proceeded
to give a spiel about how there was not to be a witch hunt and the government
would look into what went wrong:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/government-to-deal-with-what-went-wrong-in-prosecution-of-cag-chairman-liew-mun-leongs-maid-k-shanmugam-073314380.html
One cannot help but want to scream at officialdom for being “tone
deaf,” and ask if the ruling party really wants to lose more seats. Sure, Mr.
Liew has been a very successful businessman but that cannot distract us from
the fact that he and his family have been guilty of several offenses that have
been exposed in open court. By rushing to defend him, it gives the impression
that the government is only interested in protecting one of its own, which is
the very thing that Singapore tells the foreign investment community it does
not do.
The Prime Minister needs to reign in his wife and ministers.
A bit of distance from Mr. Liew would help. He should look no further than
predecessor who distanced himself from TT Durai of the National Kidney
Foundation in 2005. There, the government had the sense to realise that Mrs.
Goh’s peanut remarks were unhelpful and nobody rushed to defend Mr. Durai when
his misdeeds were uncovered.
While Mr. Liew and the government don’t emerge looking good
from this entire saga, I believe that the incident shows that there is hope.
There is hope that civil society groups like HOME (which supported Ms. Liyani)
exist. These organisations provide some hope for the least of us.
It’s also encouraging that there are lawyers like Anil
Balchandani the Managing Proprietor of Red Lion Circle Advocates and Solicitors,
who worked tirelessly and for free to see that Ms. Liyani got some justice.
Lastly, there is the man that all Singaporeans need to be
grateful for – Justice Chan Seng Onn, who weighed the evidence carefully and
looked at the circumstances in a fair and impartial manner. He was not swayed
by the influence that Mr. Liew had in the business community, ruled according
to the evidence and even went as far as to commend Mr. Balchandani for representing
Ms. Liyani so effectively.
Justice Chan has given hope to Singapore by showing that
there is a possibility of receiving fairness from the system and for the powers
that be who might condemn fairness as an airy concept, they would do well to
remember that foreign investors like places where there is rule of law rather
than rule of personality.
