They Stood Up for a Maid – They’ll Stand Up for US

 The case involving the former Chairman of the Changi Airport Group, Mr. Liew Mun Leong and his Indonesian maid has helped to spark off the old age debate on equality in Singapore. If you read enough of the online chatter, you will notice that there is common thread – Singapore is an increasingly unequal place and this small island is increasingly two societies – those with $50 million in the bank and the rest of us.

Many of us who have taken to the online space (myself included) are often filled with examples of how there seems to be one set of rules of the rich and well connected and another set of rules for eh rest of us. We say a lot but then resign ourselves to the fact that, well this is the way life is and you either learn to live with it or leave. It’s a case of thinking that this is the way things are and going to be, so what else can you do other than complain about it in cyberspace and the Powers that Be are happy to let us have our grumbles on cyberspace because it allows us to let off steam rather than get organized into anything in particular.

For many of us, the acquittal of Parti Liyani comes as a relief to many of us because it seems to be something like a big stop into the slide into decline that many of us believe our society is going through. This story of David beating Goliath gave us, the little people, a sense of hope that we have the chance to get our voice heard. If you ask enough Singaporeans, most of us will say that we don’t need to hear the side of the story of Mr. Liew and the rest of his friends because they are the ones writing the story for everyone else. It is, contrary to what Mr. Dilhan Pillay Sandrasegara, CEO of Temasek International, would tell you, it is the story of the likes of Ms. Parti Liyani that need to be heard. As Mr. Anil Balchandani, the lawyer for Ms. Parti Liyani argues, she is only one of many cases that goes unheard. Mr. Balchandani’s interview can be seen at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Az5koGHKo

We need to remember that the main point of this case was the fact that it involved a lot of pain and hard work from various parties. The reality of taking on the powerful is that its often a thankless and expensive task. As Mr. Balchandani says in the interview, plenty of foreign workers will plead guilty to accusations because in the cost-benefit analysis of things, it’s the easier option. Let’s remember, Parti Liyani, an Indonesian maid who never earned more than $600 a month, had to stay in Singapore for four years to fight those charges. Even if she didn’t pay a single cent towards her living expenses in Singapore, she was unable to earn money to send back home, which is the very reason why people work as maids or construction workers in a foreign country.

While one might argue that “well, nobody asked them to plead guilty,” we have to understand that most of us who read this post, have very rarely been in a position where we’ve been the significantly weaker party in a negotiation, particularly when it’s a negotiation where the lives of our loved ones is at stake. Like it or not, foreign workers and maids are the forgotten people of our society and we tend to dismiss the work of Organizations like HOME, ACMI and TWC2, because, well they are trying to give a voice to the people whom many of us don’t bother thinking of.

However, we can’t ignore the abuses against the downtrodden based on the fact that they’re not from around here. We need to care about abuses against them, because, well – if the system that is beholden to a rich and influential man like Liew Mun Leong can be used to against a maid, it can be used against us. The fact that Parti Liyani can win against Liew Mun Leong is hopeful because it says, we can win should we be able to win too, should we ever be in that situation.

Yet, we need to remember that there was hard work involved. While we do have laws to protect us on paper, getting the laws to work for us, is a painful process especially when you have the might of the State or someone like Mr. Liew against you. The cost of having a lawyer fight for you in the court system is prohibitively expensive. “Cheap” lawyers in Singapore cost around $500 an hour and lawyers don’t solve things in a single hour. Then there’s things like having to take time off just to deal with lawsuits.

Parti was lucky that her resolve to fight the charges against was supported by the likes of HOME and Mr. Balchandani, who worked tirelessly for her case without measuring the benefits to them. How many of people end up giving up because they don’t get the help.

Think of what happened in 2010, when Dr. Waffles Wu, had an elderly employee take the rap for him for a traffic offense. Sure, Dr. Wu did not go out of his way to get someone more vulnerable to take his place on the wrong end of the justice system. Dr. Wu was finned a grand (spare change to Dr. Wu) and had his license suspended for four months. Dr. Wu has said that he was investigated and feels bad for it:

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/woffles-wu-singapore-plastic-surgeon-on-the-record-10586278

However, for most members of the public, this incident was a case of the powerful working under a different set of laws from the rest of us. If you want Alex Au’s opinion on it, you’re going to get Alex’s apology:

https://yawningbread.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/woffles-wu-case-hits-a-nerve/

So, what can we do? Perhaps, we just need to do the simple things like trying to support the good works of NGOs and Civil Society moments like HOME. We should also go out of our way to try and support small businesses like Mr. Balchandani’s. Why do we need to do this? The answer is simple, these are organisations that support us. The people who supported a maid, the lawyer that took a long case for maid free of charge against the full weight of the state, will be the people who stand up for us should we ever be at the wrong end of the system.

How Cheap Can You Get?

 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.