GE2025
Pritam: Can't predict how voters will react to his court appeal, mentions Tharman's 1994 conviction
He dug deep into the past for this.
April 23, 2025, 06:43 PM
Will Pritam Singh's court verdict and appeal affect his chances in the general election?
While taking questions at a media doorstop on Apr. 23 afternoon, the Leader of the Opposition was asked about his thoughts on his ongoing court appeal.
"So, a few days before Parliament was dissolved, the final judgment was sent to my lawyers. And so there's a window within which we have to file the appeal," he said.
"But in terms of how the voters will react, I can't predict that."
Singh then related a story:
"There was a man, a very intelligent man, a very well-respected man in Singapore.
He was fighting the biggest election of his life, not too long ago, and he was asked about a criminal conviction that was meted out to him, and a fine that he had to pay as a result of it, and just before this big election that he was going to contest.
He said about his conviction that they got the wrong man. This was what he said: 'They got the wrong man.'
This man is our president today. His name is Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam."
The story that Singh referenced happened more than three decades ago, when Tharman was with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
The case
On Jun. 29, 1992, The Business Times published an article which forecast second-quarter economic growth of 4.6 to 4.8 per cent.
The story was accurate; the government's estimate was 4.6 per cent.
However, this number had not been released officially. It would only be published in August that year.
So how did The Business Times get the number?
This was how Cheong Yip Seng, the former Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) editor-in-chief of the English and Malay Newspapers Division recounted the incident in his memoirs:
"The story came to us in an unusual way.
A private sector economist, Manu Bhaskaran, had visited Tharman Shanmugaratnam at his office at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, where he was then the director of the MAS economics department.
The visitor saw a confidential document on the director's desk; it contained the flash estimates.
Bhaskaran passed the information to his colleague (economist Foo Jong Chen) on his return to the office, who in turned emailed it to Kenneth James, BT's economic correspondent."
Five men—Tharman, Bhaskaran, Foo, James, and Business Times editor Patrick Daniel—were charged and fined after a long-drawn trial that ended in 1994.
If you would like to read about the case in detail, here's a summary of the arguments by the defence and prosecution during the court case.
Tharman was fined S$1,500 for committing negligence in allowing sensitive government data to be communicated to the media.
But speaking to Mothership in 2023, Tharman, who was about to stand in the presidential election, said, "They got the wrong man."
