AHPETC’s Problems Traced Back To AIM Deal
Source: TR EMERITUS
AHPETC’s problems traced back to AIM deal
December 12th, 2014 | Author: Editorial
Minister of State for National
Development and MP for
Jurong GRC, Desmond Lee
Yesterday (11 Dec), Minister of State for National Development Desmond Lee and son of former cabinet minister Lee Yock Suan, dismissed Ms Sylvia Lim’s reply altogether, saying that it’s a ‘series of excuses’.
Earlier on Wednesday (10 Dec), Ms Lim, as Chairman of AHPETC, published the official reply (‘
AHPETC remains steadfast to serve residents of the town‘) on AHPETC website in response to a Lawrence Wong’s article demanding that AHPETC gives an answer to its finances.
Indeed, Ms Lim was giving her best in defending the reputation and integrity of AHPETC as well as her party WP, in response to the onslaughts of the 2 PAP ministers, Lawrence Wong and Desmond Lee.
In his official statement, Mr Lee first dismissed Ms Lim’s explanation that AHPETC’s inability to report its S&CC arrears since May last year was due to MND’s reporting format.
“The MND reporting format is not new. It has been in use for many years. All TCs have had no problem complying with it, including Mr Low Thia Khiang’s Hougang TC. AHPETC itself was able to submit its arrears reports for nearly two years, until shocking arrears rate of 30% among HDB residents and 50% among commercial tenants cropped up. It then stopped its reporting abruptly,” he said.
In her earlier official reply to Mr Wong, Ms Lim already explained that while the IT system being used at AHPETC could churn out arrears reports, manual counting and sorting was required to get the information into the format required by the MND.
“I had also informed MND that AHPETC had requested its software developers to enhance the system to churn out the reports in the required format, but this was work in progress,” she said.
Furthermore, AHPETC’s Finance Team and its software developers had to be involved in 2 consecutive audits, first by the TC’s own auditors (commencing mid 2013) and then by the AGO (commencing March 2014), and this had led to a deferment of reporting requests, including MND’s request for arrears data in its prescribed format.
“I had concurrently offered to submit to MND the arrears data the TC had as it was, but this was rejected by MND,” she said.
Root cause of AHPETC problems traced to AIM Saga
It would be fair to say that if PAP didn’t get its company AIM to “buy off” the town council management software and allowed the software continue to be used by WP after it took over Aljunied GRC, none of these delay problems would surface. After all, the software was developed with the money from town council, which in turn came from the residents.
As disclosed by Ms Lim, AHPETC now has to engage its own software developers to build and enhance the system, tailoring to the requirements of MND.
In 2010, a tender was called with AIM, $2 PAP company, the only bidder to buy over the multi-million software at $140,000. AIM then became the legal owner of the software and leased it back to the 14 PAP TCs to use. The leasing agreement contained a clause that gave AIM the right to terminate the use of the software.
Blogger Lucky Tan said of the deal [
Link]:
“The AIM deal gives enormous power to the PAP to stop the opposition from running the town councils effectively when they are chosen by the constituents to be representatives in parliament. Therein lies the conflict of interest. The rights of the people are not protected and they are put at risk.”
At the time, Ms Lim also complained:
“Dr Teo has now confirmed that this third party, AIM, is ‘fully-owned’ by the PAP. In other words, the PAP-managed Town Councils saw it fit to sell away their ownership of the systems, developed with public funds, to a political party, which presumably could act in its own interests when exercising its rights to terminate the contracts.”
AIM terminated the leasing contract with Aljunied Town Council in 2011 after WP won Aljunied GRC at the 2011 GE [
Link].
So, perhaps Mr Lee should go back and ask his bosses why allowed AIM to buy over and own the town council management software in the first place.
What do you think?
End Of Article
Reader's comment
sue blogger on AIM,so can hide:
December 12, 2014 at 8:13 pm (Quote)
The TC software which cost many millions was paid for by the constituents. Why was it handed over to AIM owned by the PAP for $140,000?
Why did the CBIP not investigate this very suspicious operation?
<span style="background-color: #FFFF00">Why did they sue a blogger when he described this AIM operation and hit the nail on its head and now his blog article on AIM is removed so that no one else will ever get to read it again?</span>
Depending on who you are, you can get away for committing a crime in SG. Now you understand why they impose such oppressive rule where you can’t even protest or criticize them without being threatened by some police thugs with the collaboration of a pack of kan**roos?