With the next
presidential election looming ahead, the PAP regime and the state
media have been busy clearing up the ‘public misperception’ that
the Elected President is nothing more but a ‘puppet’ of the
PAP.
The Ministry of Finance took the most unusual step of publishing
a FAQ section on its website to ” provide additional information on
the reserves and a new section that explains the role of the
president.”
A section is devoted specifically to clear the ‘misperception is
that the late President Ong had not been provided with sufficient
information for him to effectively protect the past reserves’.
‘In fact, he was given full access to the information of
the reserves during his term of office. This information included
the value of all the Government’s financial assets, as well as a
listing of physical assets, such as buildings and land,’
it says.
MOF added that the president has access to ‘full information
about the size of the reserves and the performance of the
investment entities’, but he cannot ‘direct the investment
strategies of Temasek Holdings and the Government of Singapore
Investment Corporation (GIC), which both contribute to the
reserves.’
It is disingenous of MOF to claim that President Ong was given
the FULL information when he literally had to ‘beg’ the
Auditor-General for bits of information to do his job.
In an interview with Asiaweek in 2000, President Ong revealed
that he was told in no uncertain terms by the government that it
would take “56 man-years to produce a dollar-and-cents value of the
immovable assets.”
He discussed this with the accountant general and the auditor
general and eventually conceded that the government only had to
declare all of its properties, a list which took a few months to
produce. Even then, the list was not complete; it took the
government a total of three years to produce the information that
President Ong requested.
It is downright despicable, deplorable and demeaning of the
state media to distort the words of ex-President Ong Teng Cheong in
order to serve the partisan interests of the PAP nine years after
his death.
President Ong was NEVER given access to the full information he
requested till the day he left office. As a result of his run-ins
with the PAP regime, he was denied a state funeral when he passed
away three years later.
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