Hsien Yang, Wei Ling continue to criticise panel
The mailbox at the house of Singapore's late prime minister Lee Kuan Yew at 38 Oxley Road in Singapore. AFP file photo
SINGAPORE — Declaring that they would not make further submissions to the Ministerial Committee tasked to look into the options for their family home at 38 Oxley Road, Mr Lee Hsien Yang and Dr Lee Wei Ling on Thursday (July 6) continued their criticism of the committee.
They asked why it previously failed to answer their “simple questions”, such as the identity of the members and the options under consideration.
“If the committee’s purposes were as innocent as it claims, it would have answered our questions promptly and transparently,” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s siblings said in a seven-page joint statement released on their Facebook pages.
It came after a two-day debate in Parliament over the allegations of abuse of power by PM Lee.
During the debate, Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean delivered a Ministerial Statement on the Ministerial Committee, which he chairs.
Among other things, he addressed the “misconception” that the Government was seeking to make a decision about the house of founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew now.
Instead, the committee was “merely preparing drawer plans of various options and their implications” for a future government to decide, Mr Teo said. It also considered Mr Lee’s thoughts on the property, and the committee had asked his three children for their views on the matter.
While the siblings offered different opinions, including the drafting of Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s Last Will, Mr Teo told Parliament that it was not for the committee to decide whose claims were valid.
In their statement on Thursday, Mr Lee Hsien Yang and Dr Lee said they were glad that the committee had acknowledged that it has no authority to rule on the validity of their father’s will.
“We see no reason to make further submissions to the committee in its current form,” they added.
Recounting their surprise when they learnt that the Cabinet had convened a committee, the siblings said it “rapidly became clear that the Ministerial Committee was just a way for (PM Lee) to secretly attack” the demolition clause regarding the house in their father’s will. They claimed that PM Lee had tried to undermine their father’s wish to demolish the house, as well as Dr Lee’s “unfettered right” to stay there.
“When a secret committee of ministers tries to ‘re-examine’ or ‘go beyond’ a legally-binding will, that disregards the rule of law and the separation of powers,” they added.
It became clear to the siblings that this was a “secret inquisition, a way for (PM Lee) to side-step the court ruling on (their) father’s will”, when the committee pushed them for statutory declarations, and involved the Attorney-General’s Chambers.
Noting that PM Lee is “seeking to paper over this serious abuse” that involves taking his grievances over their father’s estate to a “committee of subordinates”, the siblings added: “There is a clear conflict of interests and it (the committee) cannot, by any stretch of imagination, be considered an impartial forum.”
