Karl Liew, 43, is being charged with giving false information to a public servant. He told ASP Tang that “he had found 119 pieces of clothing belonging to him inside boxes packed by Ms Parti.”
He is also accused of “intentionally giving false evidence in a judicial proceeding before District Judge Olivia Low on July 17, 2018.”
The report states: “Accompanied by his legal team and an unidentified woman, (Karl) left the State Courts building at around 11am and entered a black BMW car.” He is represented by lawyer Adam Maniam from Drew & Napier, one of the top law firms in the country.
Well, I started with that because with that you see a glaring contrast between someone rich in our society facing criminal charges and a maid being hauled to court and being represented pro bono with support from a voluntary migrant organisation, while living in a rented premise, and walking to court everytime she and her lawyer Anil are called to defend the charges against her. Let me flesh it out here for you.
Assoc Editor Chua Mui Hoong has this morning written a searching article about “Justice in an imperfect world”. Let me just say that while some are leaf blower and some whistle blower, Chua is a button pusher. And one of the hot buttons she had pushed in the Parti’s case is to ask: “But was there bias? Were the police and prosecution officers more inclined to believe the Liews than the maid?”
Our Law Minister talked about the insidious old boy type “that will cause fundamental structures to be “eroded like the supporting beams of a house after termites have attacked.”” Yet, the question here is: “Are these old boy type and the generation that follows after them insidiously, if not unwittingly, creating a society that is more unequal than our Government can ever check and contain, or even have the political will and resolve to check and contain?”
Now, Shanmugam did say this yesterday in Parliament: “the message is, it doesn’t matter who you are. If you do wrong, action will be taken. But it is not only corruption that we must guard against. We must also guard against soft corruption and influence peddling.”
Well, influence peddling also comes in the hard and soft types. The hard type involves string pulling, maybe some disguised donations to a wing of a faculty in return for preferential treatment for one’s kid. But the soft type is equally insidious, because it is like the termites that Shanmugan talked about that erode the supporting beams of society.
This is where Chua’s probing struck a cognitive dissonance chord with this question:-
“When Singapore ask if the justice system is biased, they are asking not just whether the privileged get favourable treatment or pull strings for themselves, but also whether police officers, prosecutors, even judges, internalise social hierarchies and make decisions that favour the rich and powerful.”
“Are they more inclined to believe the testimony of someone from a similar socio-economic class as themselves? Who went to the same schools as them?”
Mind you, that soft type of influence peddling is best described as “implicit bias” and we accord that quite unthinkingly onto the rich and famous even when we profess to believe otherwise.
Most times, it takes conscious intervention to stop and check us from bestowing what is a soft type of favourable biased leaning on people who are wealthy, knowledgeable and/or adored by thousands.
This is something Shanmugam had spoke about and understood, but did not go far enough to fully address. He said: “People are fed up with unfair structures. Equal opportunities are drying up.” He added that we must give everyone a “fair shake” and “must be alert, guard against the wealthy and the powerful taking unfair advantages.”
“If Liew Mum Leong did unfairly influence the proceedings, then it will be a hit to our foundations. It will hit our sense of fairness, equality and justice. A dent to project Singapore itself because Singapore is built on these ideals.”
At this juncture, he then said in Parliament that the decision to sack Parti was not sudden. LML had in fact wanted to sack her way before the theft incident.
But the reality is that he didn’t sack her. Yet, what is however sudden is when Parti was asked to pack immediately and thereafter sent home by flight. That suddenness is from the perspective of Parti, not so much LML’s.
While I know it is important to present LML’s side, but in my view, it doesn’t change the suddenness of the decision to sack Parti from her side of things. Thus, what may not be sudden to LML doesn’t change what Parti had perceived to be sudden for her, especially when she was given so little time to pack.
Shanmugam also talked about the threat to complain to MOM about the deployment to Karl’s house. But as it turned out, what Parti had at first wanted to complain to MOM was that she was given short notice to leave, not the deployment.
Yet, again, the pertinent question is, “what would be in the mind of the LML and Karl at that time?” Even if Parti had told them she wanted to lodge a complaint about the short notice, it is not implausible for LML and Karl to consider the consequences arising from that complaint. And the consequence is that MOM will also find out about the deployment to Karl’s house, that breach of the rule.
As such, it doesn’t discount what Justice Chan had said about them taking a preemptive step to sack her because she is a perceived liability, or loose canon to them. And what makes it even more intriguing is the recent charges against Karl of giving false information, which further stains his motive from the get-go.
So, let me end with this: while our law minister had addressed the soft corruption and influence peddling, what is more nuanced, but no less insidious, is the concealed working of implicit bias, and how the poor and less educated are constantly singled out and discriminated against, even sidelined and dismissed.
That I believe is the frog-in-the-gradually-boiling-pot situation, and the consequences are like termites ingesting our foundation and our sense of fairness, equality and justice, the ideals we have built up and held dear.
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