Pritam Singh found guilty: Five key points from the verdict
Workers’ Party chief Pritam Singh arriving at the State Courts on Feb 17.ST PHOTO: AZMI ATHNI
Wong Pei Ting
Feb 18, 2025
SINGAPORE – Workers’ Party (WP) chief Pritam Singh was convicted of two charges of lying under oath to a parliamentary committee.
Deputy Principal District Judge Luke Tan said the prosecution had proven its case beyond reasonable doubt, and fined Singh $14,000 in all – $7,000 for each charge.
The two charges had to do with lying to the Committee of Privileges (COP) about what transpired during meetings Singh had with former WP MP Raeesah Khan on Aug 8 and Oct 3 in 2021. The meetings had to do with
an untruth that Ms Khan told in Parliament on Aug 3 that year.
Here are the key points from the judgment:
1. ‘Take it to the grave’ claim well backed by evidence
Judge Tan said
Ms Khan’s account of what was said at the Aug 8 meeting – that Singh told her “this would probably be something that we would have to take to the grave” – was supported by circumstantial and corroborative evidence.
This included a text message she had sent to her close confidants – former WP cadres Loh Pei Ying and Yudhishthra Nathan – right after the meeting, which stated that Singh and fellow WP leaders Sylvia Lim and Faisal Manap “agreed that the best thing to do is to take the information to the grave”.
In contrast, Singh’s version was that he had told Ms Khan to speak to her parents about her experience with sexual assault first, and they would then return to the issue. He said he did so while they were leaving his house after the meeting, with no one else in earshot.
The judge said it made no sense that Singh would give this instruction only when he was alone with Ms Khan, seeing as he was the one who asked her to attend the meeting with the WP leaders, and specifically prompted her to share with them what she had told him on Aug 7 about the anecdote being false.
This was especially as there was nothing secret about this instruction – to speak to her parents first – and he had already asked Ms Khan at the meeting if her parents knew about the assault.
More likely than not, any instruction would have been given in the presence of all three WP leaders so that they understood what Ms Khan was to do and there would be no disagreement with the approach, Judge Tan added.
The prosecution had also rightly pointed out that there were no minutes, e-mails, text messages, or any other form of written record of Singh’s version of what he claimed to have told Ms Khan, the judge said.
Given that Ms Khan’s untruth could potentially have a very negative impact on the WP, fellow party leaders would have needed a clear understanding of what Singh told her to do, and this would have led to some form of documentary proof of his instructions, said Judge Tan.
How Ms Khan was to have told her parents about her sexual assault also had nothing to do with how the party would have to work out something that would seriously affect its image, he added.
2. Lack of guidance showed Singh did not want untruth clarified
Judge Tan said that even if he accepted that Singh had told Ms Khan to speak with her parents before clarifying her lie to Parliament, he found it difficult to accept that the WP chief expected her to know the whole host of things she had to do to clarify the lie when he did not discuss them with her.
The to-do list included talking to her parents, explaining the sexual assault to them, explaining to them why she lied, telling them that the fact she lied was going to become public, and coming back to Singh when she was ready to have the matter clarified in Parliament.
None of these things that Singh expected Ms Khan to do was expressly articulated by him at any time during the Aug 8 meeting.
“It is clear that throughout this time, his desired laundry list of actions for Ms Khan to carry out were in his mind but never out of his mouth,” said the judge.
Except for bare submissions from the defence, no actual evidence was provided that Ms Khan would or should do or know all those things.
Singh’s “total lack of interest and action” after the Aug 8 meeting was completely contrary to his “hitherto very proactive approach and attitude” towards Ms Khan immediately after she told the untruth on Aug 3, noted Judge Tan.
It was also damning that Singh could not provide any credible response for his Oct 3, 2021, instruction to Ms Khan to clarify the untruth only if the matter came up in Parliament the next day.
By then, his MP had told a lie and left it unclarified for about two months, and Singh himself had been aware of the lie since Aug 7, 2021.
The judge agreed with the prosecution that if Singh really wanted Ms Khan to tell the truth when Parliament sat on Oct 4, he could simply have told Ms Khan that she was to clarify the untruth regardless of whether the matter was raised.
3. WP disciplinary hearings were to distance Singh from his role in Ms Khan maintaining her untruth
The judge said he found merit in the prosecution’s argument that the WP’s disciplinary panel (DP) proceedings which
Singh initiated in November 2021 – shortly after Ms Khan confessed to Parliament that she had lied – were completely self-serving and calculated to distance WP leaders from Ms Khan’s conduct.
Not only was the DP made up of the same three leaders who had guided her since Aug 8, the leaders also did not call Ms Khan out on her untruth before the DP was convened or disclose it themselves. Instead, they kept it hidden from the rest of the WP, from Parliament and from the public.
No matter which way one looked at it, it was obvious that Singh, Ms Lim and Mr Faisal, who made up the DP, were in a position of real, or at least apparent, conflict of interest, said the judge.
“There would have been a real concern that they may not be seen to be able to act fairly or impartially when inquiring into Ms Khan’s behaviour, as their own conduct in the affair would also come under scrutiny,” he said.
“This would not have been lost on (Singh) or Ms Lim, who are both qualified lawyers.”
Questioned about the issue of conflict of interest given the composition of the DP panel, Singh made several flip-flops in his evidence, the judge noted.
“Suffice to say, the constant changing of the accused’s stance reflected an inability to give a coherent and believable account in relation to both of the charges faced by him,” he said.
Singh’s troubling insistence on sitting on the DP despite being well aware of his intimate role in guiding Ms Khan on what to do about the untruth since August 2021 strongly suggested an attempt to conceal his earlier involvement and knowledge, and lack of action that it be clarified, the judge added.
4. Ms Khan and ex-WP cadres were credible witnesses
The defence had
sought to paint Ms Khan as a habitual liar, and made several bids to impeach her credibility as a witness. Among other things, the defence said Ms Khan had provided three different accounts of the Aug 8 meeting.
But Judge Tan said careful analysis showed there was in fact no real discrepancy.
All three purportedly different accounts were consistent in conveying that all those present at the meeting did not clarify the untruth. They also did not tell Ms Khan to speak to her parents about her assault, and they would address the truth thereafter.
The defence also argued that Ms Loh and Mr Nathan’s evidence could not be believed, as the former WP cadres wanted to implicate Singh to provide cover for their own conduct, and that the prosecution’s case was “essentially that of a proven liar and her two friends”.
Judge Tan said this was “not a trial simply involving one person’s words against another”, but there were text records and testimonies from former WP chief Low Thia Khiang and the former cadres to corroborate Ms Khan’s account and provide a compelling case against Singh.
He found Ms Khan to be a credible witness, and that there was no reason for her to falsely implicate Singh as this brought no benefit to her, given that she was testifying in court more than three years after the event.
It was also clear from the testimonies of Ms Khan, Ms Loh and Mr Nathan that Ms Khan was prepared to shoulder the blame.
While she displayed “clear flaws” in lying to Parliament in the first place, and despite knowing the possibility of adverse consequences to herself, Ms Khan was forthright with the COP and in police investigations, said the judge.
There was also no plausible motive for Ms Loh and Mr Nathan to lie about Singh’s actions to falsely implicate the WP chief, said Judge Tan.
Singh himself had described Ms Loh and Mr Nathan during the COP hearings as very decent and good people who worked very hard for the WP.
“I saw nothing in their evidence to suggest that they had lied in this court at this trial, or that they had tried to conceal their personal actions or their advice to Ms Khan,” said the judge.
“Instead, they have been upfront in relation to their roles and shortcomings.”
(From left) Former WP MP Raeesah Khan and former WP cadres Loh Pei Ying and Yudhishthra Nathan.ST PHOTOS: KELVIN CHNG
5. Defence made ‘backdoor attempt’ to get court to consider out-of-court evidence
Judge Tan called out the defence for making “copious references” to what Ms Lim and Mr Faisal had said outside the court, and said this “backdoor attempt” to slip evidence through is clearly impermissible.
This was because the defence did not call Ms Lim or Mr Faisal to testify in the trial. What they had said before the court trial in relation to the case – particularly at the COP hearings – therefore constituted hearsay and was inadmissible as court evidence.
Singh was the only defence witness. In contrast, the prosecution called four witnesses – Ms Khan, Ms Loh, Mr Nathan and Mr Low – who testified under oath over the 13-day trial in October and November 2024.
The defence, in its closing submissions, referred to Ms Lim’s and Mr Faisal’s testimony to the COP as evidence corroborating Singh’s account in court that he had told Ms Khan she had to speak to her parents, among other things.
It made even more extensive and liberal references to Ms Lim’s and Mr Faisal’s words to the COP in its reply submissions to the prosecution, noted the judge.
The prosecution had said that Singh’s decision not to call Ms Lim and Mr Faisal to corroborate his version of events was “telling” of which version was more believable.
The defence obviously had the chance to call either or both Ms Lim and Mr Faisal as witnesses to bolster its case, and had made a “conscious decision” not to call either of them, said Judge Tan.
“To sum up, the accused’s bare account of events essentially remains uncorroborated and unsupported by any other evidence in the present trial,” he said.
