Hell seems to have no fury like a rich man being threatened.
In the news is an acquittal of a domestic worker, Ms Parti Liyani, who had worked for the family of the chairman of the Changi Airport Group, Mr Liew Mum Leong, for about 9 years. This is thanks to her pro bono defence lawyer, Anil Balachandani, whose dedication to the case quite singlehandedly unravelled the loose threads of a highly suspicious charge of theft.
Now, Parti still has one more charge pending, “which is the possession of items, including wallets and ez-link cards, which are suspected to have been fraudulently obtained”. We will just have to leave that to the courts and the prosecution to deal with.
However, the point of this post is about how something so trivial can snowball into something so sensational, occupying one full page in The Straits Times.
From employer, they became the accusers, and after a trial that took weeks to complete, they became the accused, and that is based on these words by the High Judge: “There is reason to believe that the Liew family, upon realising her unhappiness, took the pre-emptive first step to terminate her employment suddenly without giving her sufficient time for her to pack, in the hope that Parti would not use the time to make a complaint to MOM.”
What complaint?
Well, Parti had worked for the Liew family since 2007, and sometime in March 2016, when Liew junior (young master Karl Liew) moved out of the Chancery Lane family home to a house nearby, frequent clashes started between Karl and Parti.
The clashes were centred on Karl demanding that Parti also tidy his home and his office.
According to Parti, she had to clean his office once a week for about a year. Although she was paid for the extra work, which was alleged to be $20 on each occasion, Parti however asserted that she was only paid $10 “for two to three days of work, and the payment was not regular.”
The last straw was when Parti was asked to clean Karl’s home toilet. That led Parti to threaten to report the Liew family to MOM. It was that flake of snow that eventually snowballed into a court hearing that led to this appeal to the High Court, and a successful acquittal.
This is what the High Court has to say about the judgment below: “I find that the judge’s eventual finding that the prosecution’s witnesses (which include Karl Liew) were largely credible with clear, compelling and consistent evidence, is simply unjustified and is, in my judgment, against the weight of the evidence.”
“Karl’s dishonesty on the stand was plainly evident from his testimony...The fact that Karl lied about particular items in the second amended charge does not only taint his credibility as a witness, but also affects the convictions for the items in the second charge that are premised on Karl’s testimony alone.”
What dishonesty?
Well, the theft charge was about stolen items from the Liew family home. But, to cut the long charge short, the judge noted that many of the items showed “some form of dysfunctionality.”
By this, he meant that the alleged stolen items were discarded items by the Liews, and were discarded when Karl and his family moved out of the family home. “I do not get any impression that the Liew family would have the habit of keeping old, unwanted or spoilt items in the house and not discard them.”
However, the Liews turned that around to lodge a police report claiming that Parti had stolen from them, which the High Court Judge found hard to believe.
As the trial revealed, many items like a DVD player, two watches, a Prada bag (worth $1000), a pair of Gucci sunglasses (worth $500), and some earrings, to name just a few, were in fact discarded items Parti picked out from the family trash bin.
Other items like bed linen and bed sheets were purchased by Parti from Ikea. The High Court judge “found that (Karl) had fabricated his testimony about having purchased the bedsheet from Habitat in Britain.”
Still other items like kitchenware were also purchased by Parti, and she could give details of their prices and origins. “Karl’s testimony at trial was internally inconsistent and insufficient evidence has been provided to demonstrate that the utensils and kitchenware were purchased by Karl in the manner he had described,” the judge said.
Lesson? Here’s the thing...if you read the news, you get a feel that it smacks of a gang-up of a wealthy family against their helpless domestic helper.
Based on the contextual evidence, her threat to complain to MOM led them to fire her. The firing was to preempt her from reporting to MOM, for that would have brought disrepute to the family.
Parti was given only two hours to pack, and no more. Parti was then sent back (to Indonesia). Before that, after she packed 3 boxes of her personal stuff, she requested her former employer to send the boxes back to her. Although Karl agreed to ship it back to her, he nevertheless opened the boxes and found all those allegedly stolen items. That was when they lodged the police report.
The question is, did they really bother about the stuff in her boxes? Did they really care about it? That is, the watches, the clothes, the earrings, the bed linens and the DVD player? I suspect it is more likely a case where they, especially Karl, had allowed their personal vindictive feelings to carry things too far. Mind you, even to the extent of being dishonest in court by distorting/concealing facts just to ensure the innocent is punished.
At every step of the way, before the police report, the Liew family could have given the matter more thought and mend fences or damage control, but they had missed the opportunity. Instead of being peacemaker, they unwittingly became peace-breaker.
You see, what may have been done is done, that is, demanding that Parti clean Karl’s home and office, even his toilet, and paying her a meagre sum for it, but if they had just stuck to their promise to ship her things back, and let matter rest, this public fiasco might have all been avoided altogether.
And it may even be the case that upon receipt of her boxes of things, Parti may just let bygones be bygones. For isn’t it better to let dead dogs lie than to stir the hornet’s nest?
In any event, no matter what, she had taken care of your home and family for about 9 years, and that should count for something. As an employer, from such a wealthy background, one should have taken Proverbs 19:11 to heart: “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is to one’s virtue to overlook an offense.”
Alas, the road less travelled is often one that is travelled light, free from personal grudges and bitterness, and every step of the journey is towards a heart of generosity that overlooks petty offenses. And it is well to bear in mind that just because one is wealthy and respected in society doesn’t mean that one can’t be wrong.
Indeed, in a society sorted by wealth, power and fame, the temptation is always greater at the top to dehumanise those at the bottom, and to view them as a functional means to one’s dysfunctional ends.
Anyway, my most important takeaway from this whole saga is that when you make a mountain out of a molehill, what is often exposed is your own foolishness, or worst, your embittered heart, and it becomes even more glaring each time you pile up on the heap
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