Singapore’s leader of the opposition is convicted of lying

On February 17th Pritam Singh, the leader of Singapore’s opposition, was convicted of “wilfully” lying twice to a privileges committee in 2021 and hit with the maximum fine of S$7,000 ($5,200) on each charge. The verdict caps one in a spate of scandals in the city-state’s usually dull politics.

The privileges committee vets the conduct of MPs who have legal immunity. The committee, dominated by the incumbent party, had been investigating a different lie told in Parliament by a former opposition MP, Raeesah Khan.

Ms Khan had falsely informed Parliament in August 2021 that a rape survivor had been treated insensitively when she accompanied her to a police station. No such incident occurred. But that did not stop Ms Khan from repeating the lie in Parliament two months later, before finally coming clean in November that year. During the committee proceedings the following month, she testified that Mr Singh had instructed her to “take [the lie] to the grave” when her dishonesty first surfaced. Mr Singh maintained that he told her to do the opposite. The privileges committee then imposed a S$35,000 fine on Ms Khan and recommended that Mr Singh be investigated for lying under oath to the committee.

The circumstances which led to Mr Singh’s prosecution are in many ways as novel as the charge itself. It was the first time in Singapore’s history that a politician had been prosecuted under the Parliament Act. The committee could have instead opted for a simpler censure motion, used to signal dissatisfaction with parliamentarians.

The verdict is a stain on the relatively clean image of Mr Singh’s party ahead of an election expected later this year. “It takes away any bragging rights that Mr Singh or his party may have had on the campaign trail,” says Eugene Tan of Singapore Management University.

But the ruling party is not scandal-proof. The chair of the privileges committee and former speaker of Parliament resigned after it came to light that he had had an affair with a fellow lawmaker, thus damaging his impartiality. A transport minister was jailed last year for corruption. They resigned their posts, while Mr Singh has not. He once mocked the government’s assertion that it did not need an opposition party to hold it to account, declaring the idea of “ownself check ownself”, in the local patois, to be unrealistic. Singaporeans will soon have a chance to signal whether they still trust Mr Singh’s party to do so.■