SINGAPORE, Dec 4 — Giving evidence to Parliament’s Committee of Privileges, an aide as well as a party volunteer who was close to former Workers’ Party (WP) Member of Parliament Raeesah Khan felt that party leaders should have come clean earlier about their knowledge of Ms Raeesah’s lie. 

Ms Loh Pei Ying and Mr Yudhishthra Nathan were also surprised that the party had set up a disciplinary panel on November 2 — the day after Ms Raeesah confessed to her lie in Parliament — composed solely of the three leaders who had known for months that Ms Raeesah had lied.

The three WP leaders are party chief Pritam Singh, chairman Sylvia Lim and vice-chairman Faisal Manap.

Mr Nathan felt that any inquiry should have been done sooner, given the party leaders’ knowledge of the lie. 

Advertisement

The pair gave separate testimonies under oath to the parliamentary committee looking into Ms Raeesah’s possible breach of parliamentary privilege. 

The Committee of Privileges presented a special report on the case to Parliament yesterday (December 3) and released it late that day. 

The report also stated that Mr Singh, Ms Lim and Mr Faisal told Ms Raeesah days after she lied in Parliament on August 3 to stick to the narrative, and that if she and the party could get away with it, there was no need to clarify it. 

Advertisement

Ms Loh, the co-founder and head of data visualisation and editorial studio Kontinentalist, was secretarial assistant to Mr Singh from March 2013 to January 2016, and to Ms Raeesah from July last year until she resigned from the party and her post as an MP for Sengkang Group Representation Constituency on Nov 30. 

Mr Nathan, on the other hand, has been a party volunteer since 2013 and is a PhD student in earth sciences at Nanyang Technological University, based on his LinkedIn profile. He became a WP member in 2016 and was in the WP’s youth wing council. 

The pair testified this week that they first learnt on August 7 that Ms Raeesah had told a lie during the Aug 3 sitting of Parliament.

The former MP said that she had gone with a sexual assault victim to a police station, where the victim was treated insensitively.

This did not happen. The truth was that she was a survivor of a sexual assault and heard about the alleged victim’s experience during a women’s support group she attended. 

On August 8, Ms Raeesah told Ms Loh and Mr Nathan that she met Mr Singh, Ms Lim and Mr Faisal, and that they told her “to take the information to the grave”.

When Ms Raeesah lied again during a parliamentary sitting on October 4, Ms Loh said that she was shocked and scared for the former MP. 

Mr Nathan was similarly concerned for her. Ms Raeesah told the committee that she met Mr Nathan before she was announced as the party’s youngest election candidate in June last year and they “have become quite close” since. 

On October 12, Ms Loh and Mr Nathan met Mr Singh, after Ms Raeesah told Ms Loh that she planned to come clean about the matter to Parliament. 

At the meeting, Mr Singh told Ms Loh and Mr Nathan that he met Ms Raeesah on Oct 3, the day before Parliament sat that month, and had told her that he would not judge her. 

Ms Loh testified that she was disappointed after Mr Singh told her that he had left the choice to Ms Raeesah on whether she should tell the truth if she was asked about the matter in the House on October 4. 

In this regard, Mr Nathan felt Mr Singh was “rather indecisive”.

Leaders’ Involvement ‘Intentionally Omitted’

On November 1, after Ms Raeesah came clean about the lie, Mr Singh issued a statement saying Ms Raeesah should not have given an account that contained untruths in the House. 

He added that Ms Raeesah had told him that she wanted to set the record straight in Parliament, which he said was the “correct thing to do”.

Ms Loh told the parliamentary committee that she was not 

fully happy with the statement, because it did not reveal Mr Singh’s knowledge of the matter.

“Ms Loh felt that the involvement of Mr Pritam Singh, Ms Sylvia Lim and Mr Faisal Manap had been intentionally omitted,” the committee’s report said. 

Agreeing, Mr Nathan said that the statement should have indicated that WP’s senior leaders were aware of Ms Raeesah’s lie. 

The statement had not made clear that Ms Raeesah had sought counsel from WP’s leadership, and that she had acted in accordance with their guidance.

‘Self-Serving’ Panel

Ms Loh and Mr Nathan also told the Committee of Privileges that they thought the composition of the panel “self-serving”.

Based on Ms Loh’s testimony, Mr Singh, Ms Lim and Mr Faisal were the only members of the panel and were the “very people who had known that what Ms Raeesah had said was untrue”. 

She felt that the right thing to do by that stage would have been to disclose that the panel had intimate knowledge of the falsehood from an early stage.

Concurring, Mr Nathan felt that any inquiry should have been done earlier, given that the panel’s members were aware of Ms Raeesah’s lie since August and knew that she had repeated the lie in Parliament in October.

He also felt that the panel contributed to an “uninformed, biased and jaundiced view of the incident, because it had invited WP members and volunteers to give their views on the incident without revealing that Ms Raeesah had acted with the guidance of senior WP leaders”. 

On November 25, three weeks after the panel was announced, Ms Loh and Mr Nathan met Mr Singh, Ms Lim and Mr Faisal. 

At the meeting, Ms Loh told them that they should disclose to the public the events that happened, as a failure to do so would be highly unfair to Ms Raeesah. 

Ms Loh told Mr Singh that the panel should at least relay a timeline of the events, because it would show his involvement in what transpired. 

In response, the panel’s members were said to have only nodded and took notes.

WP has not yet responded officially to TODAY’s requests for comment. 

The parliamentary committee’s report said that in closing, Ms Loh testified that it pained her to have to say all this about WP. 

“She had no agenda, and had been a member of the Workers’ Party for 10 years and gave the cause a reasonable amount of her personal time and youth. 

“She appreciated the ramifications of what she shared, but to her, beyond anything else, she felt that it is important to be truthful to the country. Ms Loh was tearing as she said this.” 

Also called before the Committee of Privileges was Mr Lim Hang Ling, a WP member who was Ms Raeesah’s legislative assistant since November last year.

In his role, he does not help Ms Raeesah with parliamentary matters, but only with grassroots activities. 

Mr Lim told the committee on Thursday that he did not know in advance about the statements that Ms Raeesah delivered in the House on August 3 and October 4, when she lied. 

The day before Ms Raeesah confessed to the untruths on November 1, however, she shared a draft of her statement with Mr Lim, who made some suggestions on the wording and language but not the substantive points made.

Unlike Ms Loh and Mr Nathan, Mr Lim was not surprised that the party started the disciplinary panel and looked forward to its uncovering the truth. He trusted that the panel would be impartial.

On November 30, before she handed in her resignation, Ms Raeesah told Mr Lim that she was planning to do so. 

Before that, the pair discussed the possibility that things would evolve to a stage where Ms Raeesah had to consider resigning, but Mr Lim did not give her any suggestions on whether she should do so, the committee heard. — TODAY