Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh
1w Edited
: ’ , High Court judge Aedit Abdullah has found Goh Jin Hian liable for US$146m (S$196m) in losses as a director of Inter-Pacific Petroleum (IPP), a now-insolvent marine fuel supplying company. In “Brief remarks” ahead of a full judgement, Aedit was scathing of Goh’s failure to discharge his duties. “The explanation proffered by the plaintiff, i.e. that the defendant [Goh] was ignorant, ties in with the behaviour and actions of the defendant, the language of the emails,”... “But a directorship is not a sinecure, nor an honorary function. The obligation is to monitor the affairs of the corporation,” he wrote, a fact that sounds like Governance 101, but one which may surprise Singaporean corporate luminaries. Critics have long complained about lax corporate governance here. A Singaporean director of 980 companies—yes, you read that right—was recently jailed after over S$7m was laundered through some of them. “An honest and reasonably diligent director would have persisted and probed further,” Aedit also said, in arguably the most brutal put-down of a member of the Singapore elite. Goh is the son of Goh Chok Tong, Singapore’s second prime minister, who left the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) in 2020. The informational flows around Aedit’s remarks, and the subsequent reporting on it, were bizarre. Aedit’s remarks were made on January 24th. Jom first received it on January 26th, presumably around the time that some others did.
Gutzy.asia, a “Taiwan-based media company”, wrote about it on February 5th. And over the subsequent days, Singapore’s mainstream media (MSM) outlets finally reported it, some two weeks after Aedit’s remarks were first made. Why the delay? We don’t know, though perhaps they were waiting for the full judgement, only to have their hand forced by Gutzy. The MSM reportage in turn appears to have prompted foreign outlets, including Bloomberg, SCMP and Yahoo! Finance, to publish stories. Interestingly, while the foreign outlets all headlined Goh’s relationship to his father, the MSM ones tucked the relevant fact into their narratives, with The Straits Times burying it in paragraph eight. Separately, Goh is also facing 39 charges in a criminal case concerning false trading, from his time as CEO of the New Silkroutes Group, an investment trading firm. His pre-trial conference is scheduled for early March, coincidentally the same time as the corruption case involving S Iswaran, former transport minister with the PAP. Hopefully we don’t have to wait till April to hear about them.