If You Never Lift the Rug, It’s Easy to Claim the Floor is Clean.

30 April 2025

“When a mistake is made, just come clean. Don’t cover it up.” ~ Minister Vivian Balakrishnan

Dear Prime Minister Lawrence Wong,

Perhaps I have simply been looking in all the wrong places for accountability. After a decade of searching, I now wonder whether governance in Singapore relies less on robust institutional frameworks, accountability mechanisms, and independent oversight, and far more on the personal integrity of a few individuals at the top.

"Prime Minister Lawrence Wong warned on 28 April 2025 that losing more PAP ministers would weaken governance..."

And so, I come to your door. Knock, knock!

Before anyone cries “foreign influence” in an attempt to deflect or discredit, let me set the record straight: I’m a whistleblower who’s spent the past decade speaking out against impotent regulators and a system that, in my view, can be exploited to shield the powerful from scrutiny. And no matter who holds power next week, I’ll still be knocking on their door. Especially now that your predecessor has pledged that your party will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, to everyone.

I believe I’m qualified to speak about accountability, or rather, the absence of it, in Singapore. Not because I’m an academic, and not as a critic shouting from the sidelines, but because like others I have lived the consequences of its failure. For more than a decade, I have fought, often alone, to raise serious, substantiated concerns about a pattern of alleged fraud involving a well-connected Singaporean. So, when I talk about accountability under the PAP, I’m not speaking in the abstract. I am speaking from bitter, firsthand experience about a system that chose to turn away, despite glaring conflicts of interest at the highest levels.

Not sure if this is hypothetical or not, but what if the PAP were more committed to control than to justice? What if there were no truly independent watchmen? What if institutions were too conflicted to act without fear or favour? And what if the machinery of the state could be quietly used, not to uphold accountability, but to shield the powerful and punish the inconvenient? What would be left of integrity? What would justice even mean? And before anyone rushes to cry “Contempt of Court,” let’s be honest: justice doesn’t always begin or end in a courtroom. As my own experience suggests, it can be quietly dismantled long before it ever gets there.

My story will be tragically familiar to anyone who has ever dared to confront power with the truth, especially in Singapore.

A wealthy, well-connected Singaporean, an influential “client” of both the government-linked bank DBS and the politically entrenched law firm Allen & Gledhill, conspired with others to defraud my family. And we weren’t the only victims. Stakeholders in a Singapore Exchange (SGX)-listed group were being misled too. When that billion-dollar group eventually collapsed, countless investors, ordinary people, not just institutions, were left stranded. I would argue they were betrayed by a system that never warned them of what was festering beneath the surface.

But that’s not my fight to have.

Just when it seemed the truth might finally come to light in the Singapore courts, the response wasn’t accountability. It appeared to be panic. Lawyers and a group legal counsel flew to Perth to meet us. The very next day, the authorised representative of the Plaintiff revealed he had been offered A$3.5 million, a price to make everything disappear. The writ that had been filed, alleging a “pattern of fraud” against two subsidiaries of the prominent SGX group, which had the possibility of blowing the lid off the can of worms, was withdrawn, but investors didn't even know it even existed.

Of course, the offer came with troubling conditions. In exchange for a slice of those proceeds, I was expected to hand over all the evidence I had spent years painstakingly gathering. I was to retract every complaint I had lodged, to Singapore’s regulators, banks, Audit Committees, Board Members, as if none of it had ever happened. I was to endorse documents I knew to contain forged signatures. I was provided with the script to quietly ask an Audit Committee Chairperson to sit on her hands and not request that the SGX appoint independent auditors to investigate the serious concerns detailed in a whistleblower submission.

This wasn’t a negotiation. It was a coordinated attempt to shield the powerful and bury the truth. The message was unmistakable: comply or take on the establishment alone. And perhaps that’s why I am still here, more than a decade later, still speaking, still writing, still demanding that someone in power has the courage to act. Because where there should have been accountability, there was none.

No one is suggesting that any conflicted party has acted improperly. But the very existence of such conflicts within the Attorney General's Chambers, the Ministry of Law, and your own party demands acknowledgment, transparency, and independent oversight. Conflicts of interest, even when not illegal, should not be swept aside. Because trust is not only eroded by wrongdoing, but by the quiet failure to confront risk when it surfaces.

But let me be clear: I’m not here to untangle your Government’s web of conflicts of interest. I’m here because justice has not been served. Despite the PAP leadership’s repeated claims that no one is above the law, and that cover-ups will never be tolerated, my experience tells a different story.

It’s been a decade since I wrote to then–Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. By that point, I had run out of patience with the PAP’s “Ownself Check Ownself” mantra, a system so tightly controlled, so wrapped in its own echo chamber, that transparency became a distant dream for me.

Then, in 2022, The Asia Sentinel picked up my story in their exposé, “Australian Woman’s Fight to Prove Singapore Fraud,” and their editor reached out to the Prime Minister's Office for comment.

And what was the response?

“We will continue to engage with Mrs. O’Connor.”

Polite. Polished. And utterly hollow.

The truth is, the Prime Minister’s Office could have just told the public the simple reality: after sitting on my submission for 18 months, handed to them by the CPIB, the Singapore Police Force quietly closed my complaint. And here’s the best part: they didn’t close it after investigating and finding "insufficient evidence to charge or prosecute." No, they closed it by claiming there wasn’t even enough evidence to open an investigation. Call me cynical, but if you never lift the rug, it’s easy to claim the floor is clean.

Perhaps the Prime Minister’s Office avoided stating the real reason my case was closed, that the police claimed there was “insufficient evidence to investigate”, because admitting that would open a Pandora’s box of uncomfortable questions. Questions like: Who decided there wasn’t enough evidence to even begin an investigation? Who chose not to look deeper? And most crucially who stood to benefit from keeping the truth buried?

https://governanceforstakeholders.com/2020/05/31/ezra-and-the-tri-tanic-part-v-the-reckoning/

We’ve seen investigations launched over the smallest of infractions in Singapore, from a lone protestor holding a smiley face poster, to a domestic worker accused of theft on flimsy and fabricated evidence, to the editor of The Online Citizen for merely sharing an open letter that I wrote. Each one was scrutinized and dragged through the system with brutal efficiency. The allegations I raised were not casual claims, they were supported by a sworn Statutory Declaration and a Statement of Claim, detailing forged signatures and the misappropriation of shares. The evidence pointed to a conspiracy to defraud, offers of hush money intended to bury material information from investors, an undisclosed writ, serious conflicts of interest, misleading disclosures, and what appeared to be a deliberate scheme to manipulate the share price of an SGX-listed company, amongst other things! Also entangled in this scheme was an associate of the “client,” who has since served a jail sentence for false trading in an entirely separate case.

To complicate the conflicts even further, Allen & Gledhill, the firm that represented the "client" was, at the time, headed by the Attorney-General himself. The Attorney-General also sits on the board of Singapore’s banking regulator, alongside the Managing Partner of the law firm that represented DBS and which publicly claimed that I had acted with malice.

Given these deep and overlapping conflicts of interest, why did the authorities refuse to take even the most basic step to open the can and see what was inside? Was it because they already knew what they’d find?

I tried to dig deeper. Allen & Gledhill, when pressed, admitted that they had represented the “client” in his personal capacity. But when asked whether they had also acted for the companies he controlled, or whether they had crafted the same option deed for his associate, being one of the documents used in the conspiracy to defraud, their response was nothing short of deafening silence. No clarification. No denial. Just the cold, impenetrable shield of legal privilege.

I tried to get to the truth at DBS after discovering that two of the bank’s letters were used to justify wiping out up to 97% of a company’s valuation just one week after the independent valuation report had been issued, all while a DBS client was actively negotiating to acquire that very company. Our lawyer raised red flags about the authenticity and use of those letters before the deal was finalized. But that’s another long story.

Suffice it to say: before the long, winding, and often disheartening DBS whistleblower process even began, we were explicitly instructed not to mention the two DBS letters in our submission, and not to tell DBS we had received that instruction. Think about that. Gagging a whistleblower before the process even starts.

A former Managing Director of a government-linked company, who had supported us throughout the preparation of our evidence, was so alarmed by what he witnessed that he felt morally obligated to act. He wrote directly to both the current and former CEOs of DBS. His message was calm, but damning. What took place was a betrayal of the whistleblower process, and what it is supposed to protect.

What took place wasn’t an oversight. It was a failure of integrity at the most fundamental level. And it should never have been allowed to happen, but it did.

The DBS board has been fully apprised of the concerns. The burden of accountability now lies firmly with them. But let’s be clear: this isn’t about the minutiae of internal investigations or finger-pointing at individual employees. The real issue is whether institutional cover-ups have occurred and without independent investigations, how can anyone be sure what’s been missed, hidden, or conveniently ignored?

Beyond the misconduct of the "client" and his associates, what I find most disturbing is the sobering realization that, in Singapore, individuals can exploit banking secrecy and legal privilege to shield themselves from scrutiny, even when there are serious allegations of questionable, if not outright criminal, conduct. And they can do so with complete impunity. Worse still is when the supposed watchdogs, whether out of fear, favour, sontaku (anticipatory obedience), or sheer fatigue, choose to look the other way. That is not oversight; it is abdication. Whether this inaction stems from an institutional cover-up is, once again, a question only a truly independent investigation can answer. But a system that regards ownself check ownself as a virtue is hardly one that can be trusted to confront its own failures. And that, far more than any reshuffling of Ministers, is what I believe truly imperils the credibility of Singapore’s governance model.

The truth may be uncomfortable. The truth may even be unwelcome. And yes, my methods of seeking justice may have been unorthodox at times, but unorthodox does not mean malicious. What I’ve laid out is not a theory, not a series of assumptions, but a lived reality.

Prime Minister Wong, if you felt no flicker of discomfort, no sense of disappointment, no outrage after I shared my concerns with your office, then that silence speaks volumes. It reveals what "accountability" has come to mean under the PAP: absolutely nothing. And this isn’t only about what happened to my family. A lack of accountability and responsibility, has far wider repercussions.

But as your own Cabinet colleague, Minister Vivian Balakrishnan advised:

“When a mistake is made, just come clean. Don’t cover it up.”

and as former PM Lee Hsien Loong has recently stated:

“We do not tell lies, and we do not tell lies about not telling lies. We speak the truth to you and to everyone. That is one thing which can keep Singapore special for many years to come.”

So, is there a glimmer of hope that someone will finally speak the truth about where and what went wrong? Or is that just wishful thinking on my part? That the lofty statements above are anything more than brand strategy? After a decade of searching for answers, it’s hard not to be more than a little sceptical , or perhaps just plain cynical.

Whether you choose to answer my knock and show the world that your Singapore house doesn’t always win, and that the floor is clean beneath the rug, that choice now rests with you. But let the record show: no one can accuse me of staying silent. No one can say I didn’t try.

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

A whistleblower.