Re: PAP MPs raised hell over minions Roy and Hui Hui, silent on Alvin Yeo
The Alvin Yeo connection
The SMC billed Susan Lim for the legal services they needed from WongPartnership, as one component of costs. These legal fees the SMC claimed they had to pay came to $900,000 for three lawyers, one of whom was Alvin Yeo. The Sunday Times on 26 October 2014 summarised the High Court’s findings thus:
The judgment: A doctor found guilty in an SMC disciplinary hearing can only be charged for the services of one lawyer – unless the proceedings are so complex they call for another lawyer who must be certified by SMC’s disciplinary committee.
This certification was not done in this case.
Assistant Registrar Jacqueline Lee decided what was claimed for both Ms Melanie Ho and Ms Lim Wei Lee should not be allowed, andthe $514,000 claimed for Senior Counsel Alvin Yeo’s work was too high.
The SMC had originally presented a bill of $1,229,804 for 1,900 hours spent by its lawyers on the case, claiming “out of abundance of caution, the amount stated is a reduced figure of the time spent”. The Law Society also has verified that the SMC paid a higher amount to WongPartnership than it is claiming from Dr Lim.
Ms Lee said that SMC’s statement meant little since she had no information on how much time had actually been spent, and criticised the council for not detailing what the lawyers had spent their time on.
She also pointed out that “collectively, Mr Yeo, Ms Ho and Ms Lim allegedly spent 718 hours” – much less than the 1,900 hours claimed for.
Ms Lee added that if the 1,900 hours included two replacement lawyers catching up on what had happened before they joined the team, “it would be unreasonable to make the respondent (Dr Lim) bear the costs arising from any such inefficiency in the conduct of the prosecution”.
– Sunday Times, 26 Oct 2014, Exorbitant, unreasonable.
As you can see from above, the facts are rather more layered and contestable than the headlines might suggest, but the public — as publics tend to be — is not going to bother much with the nuanced details of the above. All people are going to remember a week or more from now, and going into the next general election, is that a PAP member of parliament was connected with a case which the High Court considered to be overbilling. This nugget of news is going to feed into the easily-believed view that the well-off have no conscience, no sense of responsibility to wider society, and are driven by greed. And the well-off includes the ruling elite snuggling within the bosom of the PAP. As I mentioned above, in these times of ever-widening income gap — some might even describe it as obscene — such a view will find much resonance.
Against this, it is going to be virtually impossible for the PAP to convince anyone other than its diehard loyalists that its candidates are standing for election because they identify with ordinary people, or that they sense a calling to serve. Moreover, the claim of immaculate integrity that the party prides itself with is now going to have new m&d sticking to it.
That said, the SMC is appealing this decision, so the final outcome may be quite different again. However, I’d wager that even if the appeal overturns the Assistant Registrar’s finding, no one is going to believe that the $900,000 bill was fair. You can’t force people to change their private opinions; instead they are very likely to take the view that the same elite are circling the wagons defending their own.
The affective divide, a term so famously coined by Catherine Lim two decades ago, will just get wider.
http://yawningbread.wordpress.com/2014/10/28/twist-in-susan-lim-case-widens-affective-divide/
