SINGAPORE: The government of Singapore made public an email from the British newspaper The Guardian, which reported on an exclusive interview with Lee Hsien Yang on Tuesday (Aug 22) shortly after he announced that he had become a political refugee.
Mr Lee, the son of founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and younger brother of Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong, was granted asylum in the United Kingdom in August, according to The Guardian.
He alleged in a Facebook post that he sought asylum protection in 2022 due to attacks on himself, his wife, and their son and that the United Kingdom deemed he is facing “a well-founded risk of persecution, and cannot safely return to Singapore.”
The government published its response to the email from Guardian journalist Tom Burgis, calling the proposition that Mr Lee and his family were “victims of ‘baseless’ and ‘unfounded’ persecution is itself without basis.”
The response was written by Andrea Goh, Senior Director, Media Division Ministry of Digital Development and Information.
Moreover, the response underscored the absence of legal restraints on Mr Lee, his wife, lawyer Lee Suet Fern, and their son Li Shengwu in returning to Singapore.
“They are and have always been free to return to Singapore,” it added.
Mr Burgis had also touched on several other points in his email, including allegations from human rights groups of the government’s intolerance of dissent and those concerning Singapore playing “a major role in facilitating transnational corruption and belying the reputation for probity that it seeks to maintain.”
The government stated categorically there is no basis for these allegations.
It underlined the impartiality of Singapore’s judiciary, which has resulted in a high level of trust from Singaporeans.
It also cited that in 2023, Singapore ranked fifth in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index and third in the World Justice Project Index for the absence of corruption in its legal and law enforcement systems.
“In Singapore, no one is above the law. Anyone, including the offspring of the founding prime minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, can be investigated and brought before the courts,” the response read.
As to the allegation in Mr Bugis’s email concerning the city-state’s economic growth being concentrated within those in leadership and their allies, the government said this is “far from the lived experience of Singaporeans.”
It cited several statistics to back this assertion, including over 80 per cent of Singaporeans living in public housing, with most owning their homes, and the growth of real wages over the past decade. /TISG
Read also: Lee Hsien Yang: I am a political refugee from Singapore under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention