Singapore — Workers’ Party chairperson Sylvia Lim was frustrated that her party’s then MP Raeesah Khan had doubled down on her original lie instead of setting the record straight, despite having confessed to party leaders that she had lied in Parliament on Aug 3.
Ms Lim’s testimony before the Committee of Privileges (COP) was made public on Dec 14. When she testified at the committee hearing and was questioned by Culture, Community and Youth Minister Edwin Tong, Ms Lim said she was “very frustrated” when on Oct 4, Ms Khan lied again in Parliament.
This time, it was to Minister K Shanmugam (Law and Home Affairs) when he was probing her about the incident she mentioned in her Aug 3 speech on women’s empowerment.
“It didn’t appear that any progress had been made in moving towards correcting the record and in fact, at that exchange, there was a doubling down on the untruth,” Ms Lim Told the committee.
When asked by Mr Tong if Ms Khan’s answers to Mr Shanmugam on Oct 4 could have been in keeping with directions given to her by WP head Pritam Singh, Ms Lim replied, ”I will not be able to believe that Pritam had asked her to lie or gave her a choice to lie. That was definitely not our understanding of what should be done.”
She added that she asked to meet Ms Khan at Mr Singh’s office after the Oct 4 session, and observed that Ms Khan looked like she was was “not in a good place” at that time and that she appeared “highly stressed.”
Mr Tong then asked Ms Lim if it were not an option for Ms Khan to set the record straight the next day when Parliament met again.
“I think theoretically, yes, it’s an option. But practically, I don’t think it’s an option. Because such a matter were she to come to explain how she came to tell the untruth, and in her mind she has to talk about her past experience, and also the fact that she repeated it on (October) the fourth; it would require careful structuring — her drafting — and that to make sure that she’s very emotionally stable and comfortable with her statement of clarification,” said Ms Lim.
Ms Khan also met Ms Lim and Mr Singh at his home on Oct 12, and Ms Lim said she deduced that Ms Khan had still not told her parents that she had been a victim of sexual assault, and she still seemed reluctant to come clean.
Ms Lim said that Mr Singh “started off the meeting by asking her, ‘So what are you going to do about this?’ And then she said, ‘I still don’t think I want to tell the truth’.
“So at that point, I got angry, and I think Pritam was also angry, and we told her that this correction has to be made.
“And we tried to persuade her by saying, ‘If you do not make the correction, this is going to weigh on you for the rest of your life, and it will be too much of a burden for anyone to bear. You need to correct this so that everyone is clear, and we can move on from there.’” /TISG
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