The Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) has released a statement accepting the apology issued by Kingdom Community Church Ventures’ (KCCV) for the last-minute event venue cancellation and the poor initial justification for doing so.

This comes after a meeting between party chief, Chee Soon Juan, and the church’s senior pastor, Vincent Lun.

Lun had contacted Chee and asked to meet.

Looking for sincerity

In a post on Facebook, Chee described the meeting as “good” and that SDP, in accepting Lun’s apology, now considered the matter closed.

The post also said that on behalf of KCCV, Lun had accepted full responsibility for the incident.

Lun also compensated the SDP for the expenses incurred as a result of the change in venue.

“We were looking for sincerity and we saw that in Pastor Lun”, he said

Chee added that one learning point from the incident was that “we don’t have to pursue everything in court and exact our pound of flesh”.

Background

The SDP had planned to hold their campaign launch on Saturday, Feb. 23 at an auditorium in Eunos Ave 3 run by KCCV, which according to the SDP, is the business arm of Kingdom Community Church, a local Christian church.

The church also conducts its service at the venue.

However, the SDP were forced to find a new venue after being told by the church that they could no longer hold their campaign launch in the auditorium, a mere 26 hours before the event was to be held.

Conflict with JTC

The church had initially told the SDP that the event could not go ahead because of an inspection being conducted by the JTC Corporation.

The SDP then went on to cite the JTC inspection as one of the reasons for the last-minute change of venue in a statement released on Feb. 22, the day before the event.

This led to an exchange on social media between the SDP and JTC, whereby JTC chided the SDP for its “totally irresponsible” allegations.

KCCV had earlier released a statement to the Straits Times apologising for “being the cause of the misunderstanding” between JTC and the SDP.

However, the SDP has stated that they are still waiting for JTC “to also do the right and decent thing” and issue an apology.

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Top image from SDP website