MOF:ex-President Ong given â€˜full accessâ€™ to info reserve (?)

shanfan

27 Jul 11, 12:36

MOF: ex-President Ong was given ‘full access’ to information of reserves

July 27th, 2011 |

With the next presidential election looming ahead, the PAP regime and the state media have been busy clearing up the ‘public misperception’ that the Elected President is nothing more but a ‘puppet’ of the PAP.

The Ministry of Finance took the most unusual step of publishing a FAQ section on its website to ” provide additional information on the reserves and a new section that explains the role of the president.”

A section is devoted specifically to clear the ‘misperception is that the late President Ong had not been provided with sufficient information for him to effectively protect the past reserves’.

‘In fact, he was given full access to the information of the reserves during his term of office. This information included the value of all the Government’s financial assets, as well as a listing of physical assets, such as buildings and land,’ it says.

MOF added that the president has access to ‘full information about the size of the reserves and the performance of the investment entities’, but he cannot ‘direct the investment strategies of Temasek Holdings and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), which both contribute to the reserves.’

It is disingenous of MOF to claim that President Ong was given the FULL information when he literally had to ‘beg’ the Auditor-General for bits of information to do his job.

In an interview with Asiaweek in 2000, President Ong revealed that he was told in no uncertain terms by the government that it would take “56 man-years to produce a dollar-and-cents value of the immovable assets.”

He discussed this with the accountant general and the auditor general and eventually conceded that the government only had to declare all of its properties, a list which took a few months to produce. Even then, the list was not complete; it took the government a total of three years to produce the information that President Ong requested.

It is downright despicable, deplorable and demeaning of the state media to distort the words of ex-President Ong Teng Cheong in order to serve the partisan interests of the PAP nine years after his death.

President Ong was NEVER given access to the full information he requested till the day he left office. As a result of his run-ins with the PAP regime, he was denied a state funeral when he passed away three years later.