All photos by Sean Yeo and Edwin Koo.

It's a pity, really — the last group of candidates unveiled by the Workers' Party (WP) should technically be seen as the most exciting one.

And we suppose the trio presented on Monday afternoon should have captured sufficient interest and attention — senior medical social worker Frieda Chan, 39, who stood in the now-defunct Moulmein-Kallang GRC in 2011, business consultancy CEO Leon Perera, and funeral services company executive Bernard Chen, who is a longtime member of the WP.

Yet, reporters gathered at the party's last pre-Nomination Day press conference honed their attention on party chairman Sylvia Lim and CEC member/Aljunied Hougang Punggol-East Town Council audit committee head Png Eng Huat.

This is why:

Essentially, that's what you need to know — following a weekend that saw the Ministry of National Development (MND) and two ministers firing shots at the very-beleaguered AHPETC, The New Paper on Monday published a scoop on its former managing agent, FM Solutions and Services, seeking some $3.5 million in unpaid fees.

Here are five things we observed at Monday's press conference that inform us of this:

1. The bulk of the questions asked were aimed at Lim and Png, once again.

Journalists from The New Paper, The Straits Times, Channel NewsAsia, Lianhe Zaobao and Today aimed rapid-fire questions at the two of them about the revelation — what were these fees for exactly? Why hadn't the town council paid for them? Why were they saying that their accounts were in surplus, when this had happened? Haven't they already paid FMSS substantial sums; why is FMSS still asking for more?

It was only after they had exhausted all conceivable methods of obtaining further information about the controversy, and failing, that they gave up and started asking sideways questions to the new candidates, like, "How frequently did the party leadership keep you in the loop on what was happening?" and "Have you learned any lessons from the WP's experience running a town council?"

2. Lim displayed skills in dodging all the questions thrown at her, while Png continually tried to encourage people to direct posers to the new candidates.

After the first question from TNP about the latest controversy, Lim effectively enveloped herself and the town council with this safe (albeit not entirely satisfactory) answer:

We can confirm that we received this letter but this is actually quite old news as it has been overtaken by some events. This letter was received by the town council in late July, and this was about one month after the managing agent contract expired. So in the normal course of events all our contractors know that the Town Council, when it receives claims, it will exercise due diligence to check and verify whether those claims are accurate and valid.

...

There are some payments which are not being made because the Town Councils see those claims as disputed claims, and right now the parties have agreed to follow the MA agreement which provides for any disputes between the parties to be settled by mediation.

So this matter is actually set for mediation before the Singapore Mediation Centre and the process is supposed to be amicable, and we will go through that process which is fixed for October. And if for some reason that process does not yield the agreed result, then the MA agreement further provides for the matter to be solved by arbitration. There will not be any litigation concerning this case.

Following further questions of how much was paid up and how much wasn't, and what exactly the services were that they had supposedly not paid for, Lim would only say she does not "think it's helpful" to go into details because the dispute was undergoing mediation, which is "supposed to be a private process".

3. (Not entirely relevant, but) A couple of rookie-looking reporters from international news agencies attempted to sound intelligent, but failed.

The first one, from Phoenix Chinese News, asked what the WP has in store for international audiences, apart from providing "checks and balances" in Parliament. What, she asked, would the party have "in mind" to offer Singaporeans, "from an international perspective"?

Lim's response was a sly dig we suspect she probably failed to catch:

Well I don't think we're offering international audiences anything in particular... because our politics has always been based locally. But I think Singaporeans and the media here understand us over quite a number of years already...

She went on to educate the young reporter that being elected in Singapore doesn't just entail speaking up in Parliament, but also includes running the constituency they represent, and their town councils.

The second one, from Reuters, attempted, with a Western accent, to ask "if the PAP was going to cling to power", what the WP's strategy was to increase its number of seats won, and twice adopted a roundabout way of enquiring if it was going to champion "civil liberties", which is "something international audiences are interested in".

Png must've been so amused by her ignorance that he had to ask her what her first question was. He then graciously tackled her questions, by explaining first that "yes, the PAP will retain power as the WP is only contesting 28 seats out of 89", and then exposed her failure to consult the party manifesto before asking her question by simply pointing out that a section in it raises the Public Order Act, which they are against.

4. Lim had a funny "Freudian slip" moment, which even she admitted to:

A second TNP reporter posed the final question at the press conference, once again about the same issue — nobody has said what constitutes a reasonable amount of money to be paid to a managing agent, so was the WP planning to ask the PAP-run town councils to share that?

Lim's answer:

I think the PAP — sorry, Freudian slip — the MND is the one that came up with this (laughter all round) so I think they should tell us what is an acceptable level of profit in their view, and perhaps also tell us how much money has been made by the managing agents managing the PAP town councils, because this is just a statement for them and I don't think it's for us to explain what they mean.

Sorry, Freudian slip! What could she possibly mean? Of course the PAP has absolutely nothing to do with the MND.

5. Lim simply couldn't get away from reporters, even after the press conference was over.

She was stopped not once, but twice, by the scrum, who at the first instance persisted in probing and rephrasing questions they asked earlier, in a bid to get as much info as they could about the payment dispute between FMSS and AHPETC.

To be fair, they did manage to get her to say that FMSS was making claims in terms of fees from project monies, which "are sinking fund expenditures and so don't affect the bottom line in terms of surplus or deficit", but beyond that, not much else.

We now wonder what the relationship between AHPETC and the WP's longtime supporters and friends at FMSS is like.

Top photo by Sean Yeo.

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