SINGAPORE: The thwarted deal between Income and Allianz last year has become a hot-button issue in this election cycle, especially after an open letter was published by former National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) Income CEO Tan Suee Chieh, who had objected to it.
The issue was also brought up in the first Workers’ Party (WP) rally on April 24 by Jalan Kayu SMC candidate Andre Low, given that he is up against the People’s Action Party’s (PAP) Ng Chee Meng, the longtime secretary-general of the NTUC.
Mr Low had criticised the NTUC’s endorsement of the deal, clarifying later that his stand is not against Mr Ng personally but that the issue is just one of the missteps of the previous administration.
On Sunday (April 27), Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong came to Mr Ng’s defence on the issue. He also said that only one WP Member of Parliament had raised a question on the deal and that the WP had abstained from an Amendment Bill meant to block it.
“If it had been left to the Workers’ Party as government, the deal would have gone through because they didn’t oppose it, right?” said SM Lee.
At a doorstep interview on Monday (April 28), a reporter asked WP chief Pritam Singh for his comments on what SM Lee had said.
Mr Singh said that there was a good reason for WP to have abstained from voting, which is recorded in the Hansard.
WP Member of Parliament (MP) He Ting Ru said in October, ”The Workers’ Party supports the government’s blocking of the proposed acquisition in its current form on public interest grounds, based on publicly available information, especially given the concerns that my colleagues and I had raised in this chamber in August. Therefore, we will not be rejecting the bill.
“However, we believe that to whether this bill will be seen to be rushed and retrospective legislation making and this assault on legal and regulatory certainty, that changing legislation in the middle of a major life transaction means that we would need to register our abstention on this bill.”
Mr Singh said, “Maybe the Senior Minister has forgotten about it or only wants to present one side of the facts.”
As for the issue of the deal going through had the WP been in government, Mr Singh answered, “But we weren’t in charge.”
When Mr Singh had previously said that no labour MP had brought up the issue in Parliament, Mr Lee said that six non-labour PAP MPs had done so, while only one from the WP, Sengkang GRC’s Ms He raised a question as well.
The WP chief said that this answer “sidestepped the issue of no labour MPs bringing up the matter,” and added, “It puts into perspective the ratio of how many PAP MPs there are in parliament, and how many Workers’ Party MPs there are in parliament. The ratio isn’t one is to six, it’s closer to one is to nine.”
He also said that this is something that voters have to “think about very carefully, because even if you look at the entire slate, there are 26 candidates that the Workers’ Party has put forward.”
Should all the WP candidates win, it would bring the ratio closer to three is to nine, Mr Singh added. /TISG