LHL’s eroded sense of moral right and wrong and inability to see any conflicts between his personal business interests and those of the state has deeply infected his underlings who display a shocking blindness to conflicts of interest between their role as members of the Government and their private business interests.
I was shocked to read Lee Bee Wah’s self-justifying denunciation on Facebook a few days ago of an article which exposed the fact that the civil engineering company she owned, LBW Consultants LLP, had tendered for eleven projects from HDB in 2011 and had been successful in winning two of them. One of them, Khatib Court, was in her constituency, Nee Soon GRC. Ms Lee said “the tender was carried out fairly and transparently.”
That is beside the point. As she is a Government MP, her firm should have been barred from bidding on contracts awarded by a Government agency, statutory board or government-owned company.
Just because Ms Lee says the tender was carried out fairly and transparently, does not automatically mean that it was. How are the public to know or to be sure that Ms Lee possessed no inside information which gave her company a winning edge? Particularly as Ms Lee was also the MP for the ward where the contract was awarded and a member of the Town Council. Or how do we know that there was no indirect pressure or influence on the civil servants awarding the contract?
There are strict rules in most democracies about elected representatives from the governing party being required to divest their private business interests or to refrain from bidding for Government contracts.
Ms Lee is also Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee for National Development. Parliamentary Committees supposed to act as a check on the ministries and their statutory boards. The Ministry of National Development is in charge of HDB so the Parliamentary Committee oversees HDB. If the Chairman benefits directly from a contract given to her by the statutory board her committee overseas, then surely that is a fundamental conflict of interest?
Ms Lee says in the same post that LBW Consultants LLP was acquired by Meinhardt Group International in January 2014, given its track record. But surely its track record depended on the contracts it had won, including the two HDB contracts. When Meinhardt bought her company presumably they paid for the present value of the income stream from those Government contracts that her company should not have received in the first place.
For Ms Lee to say that her firm won the contracts fairly and transparently as a defence for being allowed to profit from doing business with the Government is exactly the same as LKY’s justification for his wife’s firm, Lee and Lee, being allowed to do conveyancing work for HDB. Lee and Lee were for many years one of the principal law firms acting for HDB and may still be. LKY admitted in court during his libel action against JBJ in 1976 that for a period he had stopped HDB from using Lee and Lee but that after a period he had sent a letter to HDB saying that Lee and Lee should be allowed to compete “on equal terms” with other law firms.
In a further irony, Ms Lee benefited financially from a discount not available to the general public on the purchase of a property in a private development, 91 Marshall in Katong, in 2012. She was a non-executive director of the company, Tee Homes. While the board may have found that the discount did not prejudice the interests of minority shareholders, I would question how she could both be a director of a property company and chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on National Development which oversees the sale of Government land to property developers. It is very similar to the case of Hotel Properties Limited in the 1990s where most of the Lee family members were found to have received discounts on the purchase of property, including LKY and his son. The Prevention of Corruption Act Section 8 states clearly that there is a presumption of corruption when a member of the Government receives a gratification from any person having dealings with the Government or any department thereof.
Ms Lee’s case is not an isolated one. We already have far too many cases of PAP MPs being employed by statutory boards or Government-linked companies or companies doing business with the Government which is hard to avoid in a country where the Government dominates the economy after foreign owned companies are excluded.
More here...http://sonofadud.com/2015/07/24/our...er-distinguish-right-fromwrong/#comment-60131
I was shocked to read Lee Bee Wah’s self-justifying denunciation on Facebook a few days ago of an article which exposed the fact that the civil engineering company she owned, LBW Consultants LLP, had tendered for eleven projects from HDB in 2011 and had been successful in winning two of them. One of them, Khatib Court, was in her constituency, Nee Soon GRC. Ms Lee said “the tender was carried out fairly and transparently.”
That is beside the point. As she is a Government MP, her firm should have been barred from bidding on contracts awarded by a Government agency, statutory board or government-owned company.
Just because Ms Lee says the tender was carried out fairly and transparently, does not automatically mean that it was. How are the public to know or to be sure that Ms Lee possessed no inside information which gave her company a winning edge? Particularly as Ms Lee was also the MP for the ward where the contract was awarded and a member of the Town Council. Or how do we know that there was no indirect pressure or influence on the civil servants awarding the contract?
There are strict rules in most democracies about elected representatives from the governing party being required to divest their private business interests or to refrain from bidding for Government contracts.
Ms Lee is also Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee for National Development. Parliamentary Committees supposed to act as a check on the ministries and their statutory boards. The Ministry of National Development is in charge of HDB so the Parliamentary Committee oversees HDB. If the Chairman benefits directly from a contract given to her by the statutory board her committee overseas, then surely that is a fundamental conflict of interest?
Ms Lee says in the same post that LBW Consultants LLP was acquired by Meinhardt Group International in January 2014, given its track record. But surely its track record depended on the contracts it had won, including the two HDB contracts. When Meinhardt bought her company presumably they paid for the present value of the income stream from those Government contracts that her company should not have received in the first place.
For Ms Lee to say that her firm won the contracts fairly and transparently as a defence for being allowed to profit from doing business with the Government is exactly the same as LKY’s justification for his wife’s firm, Lee and Lee, being allowed to do conveyancing work for HDB. Lee and Lee were for many years one of the principal law firms acting for HDB and may still be. LKY admitted in court during his libel action against JBJ in 1976 that for a period he had stopped HDB from using Lee and Lee but that after a period he had sent a letter to HDB saying that Lee and Lee should be allowed to compete “on equal terms” with other law firms.
In a further irony, Ms Lee benefited financially from a discount not available to the general public on the purchase of a property in a private development, 91 Marshall in Katong, in 2012. She was a non-executive director of the company, Tee Homes. While the board may have found that the discount did not prejudice the interests of minority shareholders, I would question how she could both be a director of a property company and chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on National Development which oversees the sale of Government land to property developers. It is very similar to the case of Hotel Properties Limited in the 1990s where most of the Lee family members were found to have received discounts on the purchase of property, including LKY and his son. The Prevention of Corruption Act Section 8 states clearly that there is a presumption of corruption when a member of the Government receives a gratification from any person having dealings with the Government or any department thereof.
Ms Lee’s case is not an isolated one. We already have far too many cases of PAP MPs being employed by statutory boards or Government-linked companies or companies doing business with the Government which is hard to avoid in a country where the Government dominates the economy after foreign owned companies are excluded.
More here...http://sonofadud.com/2015/07/24/our...er-distinguish-right-fromwrong/#comment-60131
