Bought, Buried, and Ignored
- Julie O'Connor
- 46 minutes ago
- 6 min read
9 February 2026
Dear Prime Minister Wong,
Let me be unequivocally clear. Any complaints which I have raised, which might leave individuals within PAP, or government-linked institutions, including DBS, the Attorney-General’s Chambers, or the Ministry of Law conflicted, have not arisen from anything I did or failed to do. They arose from pre-existing professional and institutional relationships over which I had no influence or control.
I have raised substantiated concerns. Rather than being independently and properly investigated, these matters have repeatedly been dismissed on the basis of “insufficient evidence,” despite that same evidence being considered sufficiently valuable by other interested parties to warrant financial inducements for silence.
A system that refuses to look cannot credibly claim that nothing was found. Where oversight is absent or compromised, accountability does not disappear, it rises to the political level. As Leader of Singapore’s ruling party, that responsibility should now rest with you. I therefore ask what concrete steps your government will take to ensure that no individual or institution is permitted to place itself beyond scrutiny? If my case is not an isolated incident, but rather the product of individual or structural failure, then the implications are grave. A system in which whistleblowers are being coerced into silence to preserve a veneer of integrity is not protecting the rule of law, it is undermining it.
For more than a decade, I have raised concerns that go to the heart of market integrity in Singapore. Despite repeated correspondence, those concerns were never properly examined. They were not disproved, resolved, or transparently addressed; they were simply left unanswered.
You and your colleagues have spoken repeatedly about integrity, even taking the significant step of removing the Leader of the Opposition’s title in the name of protecting the integrity of Parliament. Your predecessor has emphasised that moments of testing are precisely when principles matter most:
“...when the party is tested, it must prove its mettle. Put our principles into action, regardless of any embarrassment or political cost."
"Deal with it without fear or favour, and get to the bottom of the matter. If anyone does anything improper, the wrongdoing will come to light sooner or later and “consequences will follow."
"Everybody who does business here, whether you are a non-Singaporean or Singaporean, must know that this is how things work in Singapore. Our integrity and honesty must never be compromised; only in that way can we do justice and uphold the trust that Singaporeans have given us.” ~Lee Hsien Loong
Prime Minister, I ask you to pause on this. Do you know what it feels like to watch you and your colleagues stand in Parliament, speaking from a position of moral authority about integrity, trust, and honesty, repeating that cover-ups are not permitted and that no one is above the law in Singapore, while I have lived through the opposite? Integrity cannot exist only in speeches. It must survive contact with cases that are uncomfortable, contested, or politically inconvenient.
What does it say about integrity within the system when evidence and silence can be bought; when senior staff within a conflicted, government-linked bank can dictate what must be omitted from a whistleblower submission; and when the Attorney-General’s Chambers, exercising prosecutorial discretion, can advise the police that there is insufficient evidence even to investigate a client of the very law firm that was headed by the current Attorney-General at the time of the events?
Watching some individuals publicly punished in the name of integrity, while evidence-backed events that arguably caused far greater harm to Singaporeans remain unaddressed, is deeply jarring. The question is no longer whether there was a cover-up by board members of an SGX-listed group, but why clear red flags and whistleblower warnings were ignored by those entrusted to safeguard the market. This was never a private dispute. It is a question of market integrity, and whether power, connections, and wealth can still be used to quietly bury uncomfortable truths.
When I spoke up, not a single board member stood with me. Not one. There was no defence of shareholders, no public reckoning, no acceptance of responsibility. Instead, one by one, they stepped away from their boards, as though fading from view could erase what had occurred or absolve them of the duties they owed to the market and to the public.
Perhaps they were concerned because of the powerful connections of the board member at the center of my complaints. As much as I dislike saying it, fear may explain their silence, but it does not excuse it.
I was not a politician. I did not seek confrontation. I was a wife and a mother who stumbled across evidence that forged signatures had been affixed to legal documents on behalf of a struck-off entity, and that investors in an SGX-listed group were being misled. When I realised what I was holding, I did not rush to social media or the press. I gathered evidence carefully, sought professional advice, and went to the proper authorities.
At my own time and expense, I obtained offshore company records. I engaged an eminent forensic signature examiner. I secured sworn statements confirming that signatures on legal documents had been forged. I documented everything.
I escalated my concerns through every appropriate channel, boards, banks, regulators, legal bodies, and eventually the Prime Minister’s Office. Along the way, I watched a Chairman, CEO, and COO resign en masse from the very board to which I had made my whistleblower report. Two audit committee chairs and numerous board members quietly followed. But no one spoke up.
I saw a government-linked bank run repeated “investigations” that appeared designed to protect itself rather than uncover the truth. A bank that took almost eight weeks to refuse to authentiate letters used in a conspiracy to defraud. And a senior staff member who instructed a whistleblower not to reference those same letters in his submission, and not to tell the bank he had been given that instruction.
At one point, millions of dollars were offered by a board member of an SGX-listed group for evidence be surrendered, complaints withdrawn, and an undisclosed writ served on the SGX-listed group, implicating him in an alleged pattern of fraud, be retracted. That moment still stays with me, not just because I was tempted, but because it later revealed something profoundly wrong. Evidence serious enough to buy should be evidence serious enough to investigate.
How does a system conclude there is insufficient evidence before the evidence has been tested?
How does it reconcile that conclusion when there were attempts to financially induce its destruction?
Are board members of SGX-listed companies, whether using company funds or otherwise, being routinely allowed to pressure whistleblowers and witnesses into silence, to keep the "system" looking clean?
Why are claims repeatedly made that cover-ups are not allowed and that no one is above the law in Singapore, if that is not borne out in practice? How many such cases exist, and how many have been resolved through genuine scrutiny rather than quiet containment?
The consequences in my story were not theoretical. Investors in the SGX-listed group were misled. The group continued raising funds, only to collapse later. Singapore banks were left exposed to potential losses of up to a billion dollars. My family paid a very different price: financial loss and more than a decade spent trying to persuade anyone to investigate what had occurred. I was not alone in raising the alarm, though I had access to information others did not, information that had been deliberately withheld from the public.
I am not asking you to prejudge guilt. I am asking for something far more fundamental: an independent investigation, or at the very least, a public explanation as to why one has not occurred. Integrity is easy to invoke when it is convenient and cost-free to one’s party, as demonstrated in the recent case involving Pritam Singh. It is far more difficult to uphold when doing so is inconvenient, contested, or uncomfortable for one’s own party. Yet those are precisely the moments when integrity has meaning, not in motherhood statements, but in action.
I remain willing to assist fully with any genuinely independent investigation into the matters I have raised. I have nothing to conceal. I cannot, however, speak for others who may prefer that scrutiny be avoided and that inconvenient facts remain unexamined in order to protect themselves or others.
Julie O'Connor