Guess who wrote this entire thing as a page rather than a post at first and then wondered why Ghost wouldn’t let me send it out as an email… My brain is having a bit of a time. I think I shifted everything over properly but apologies if there are any minor errors!
(1)
Ariffin Sha, founder of Wake Up Singapore, was fined $8,000 after pleading guilty of criminal defamation. Ma Su Nandar Htwe, who had fed Wake Up Singapore the false story, also plead guilty and was fined $10,000.
This hopefully brings this fake KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH) story saga to a close, allowing Ariffin to move on with his life. Everything happened in 2022, and when Wake Up Singapore discovered that the story was actually false they’d swiftly retracted the story and issued an apology. They’d also been POFMAed (and complied). It was ridiculous overkill for Ariffin to have been charged with criminal defamation in the first place.
(2)
Workers’ Party leader Pritam Singh wants to be tried in the High Court. He’s applied for his upcoming trial to be transferred from the State Courts to the High Court, pointing to former transport minister S Iswaran’s case.
“The effect of a transfer of a criminal case from the State Courts to the High Court is significant,” he writes in a media statement posted to Instagram. “An appeal from a decision made at the State Courts can only be heard by the High Court, and not the highest court of the land—the Court of Appeal—where more than one judge presides over the appeal.”
He adds:
As the two charges preferred against me arose from the findings of Parliament’s Committee of Privileges, the impact of the Court’s interpretation of section 31(q) of the Parliament Act may extend beyond how MPs are to conduct themselves in Parliament, covering much broader and significant issues like how inquiries by the COP are conducted […] and the degree of proof required before a recommendation from criminal prosecution is made.
Beyond criminalizing the conduct of MPs, Parliament’s powers under this section have real implications for ordinary members of the public, who can be summoned before the Committee of Privileges or any other Committee to that end.
[…] Whilst the Prosecution characterised my case as a “high profile one”, they maintained there were no “significant public interest considerations” necessitating a transfer of the case to the High Court.
My lawyers saw the Prosecution’s different treatment of what was in the “public interest” as contradictory.
The case has been adjourned to 9 September.
(3)
Does anyone pay attention to POFMA orders these days? I try to keep an eye on things—I have a POFMA Tracker spreadsheet—but even I missed a couple of POFMA directions issued this past week.
The first was issued to Yee Jenn Jong, former Workers’ Party NCMP, over a couple of Facebook posts he’d made about the whole Aljunied-Hougang Town Council saga. Yee had written his observations on the long-winded case. MND has taken issue with his account, providing a long “Factually” correction that you can read here.
The second POFMA from MND on 26 August went to Leong Sze Hian. Leong had commented on housing grants for HDB resale flats in a Facebook post published on 21 August. MND says he’s made false claims about means-testing requirements.
Just FYI if anyone wants to look into these. They’re not very interesting and I have no idea who is actually reading these. I’m not even sure how much credibility POFMA directions have these days.
Got some more…
😒 A 37-year-old Singaporean tried to get his estranged wife in trouble by planting cannabis in her car. They hadn’t been married long enough to get a divorce—you need to be married at least three years in Singapore to get a divorce, unless you get special permission—but thought it’d be possible if one of them had a criminal record. He planted 11 packets of cannabis in her car, even though he knew that more than 500g of cannabis could result in the mandatory death penalty. He’s been sentenced to prison for possession of cannabis (lucky for him, after analysis, the amount of pure cannabis was 216g), so I guess our master schemer did achieve the goal of giving one spouse a criminal record after all. But please, just let people get divorced regardless of how long they’ve been married. Some people clearly really need it.
