Former NUS law professor, Tey Tsun Hang, was sentenced to a 5 months’ jail term and ordered to pay a penalty of $514.80 by the court yesterday. He was convicted of corruptly obtaining gifts and sex from former student Darinne Ko.
Last week, the former chief of the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF), Peter Lim Sin Pang, was convicted by a District Court for corruption. He was on trial for abusing his position to obtain sexual favours from Ms Pang Chor Mui in return for favorable consideration of her company’s tender bid for business.
Also last week, the Ministry of Home Affairs said disciplinary proceedings against the former chief of the Central Narcotics Bureau Ng Boon Gay would remain suspended until a final outcome in the criminal proceedings. Mr Ng was acquitted of corruption charges in February. Mr Ng was accused of obtaining sexual favours from IT sales manager Ms Cecilia Sue in return for furthering the business interests of her two employers. The MHA spokesperson also said that the prosecution was studying the written grounds of decision and assessing whether to file a Petition of Appeal.
Even though Gay was acquired, all three public servants paid a high price for being a bit (very cheap actually) cheap when it came to sex. In return for a few freebie trysts, they ended up spending very serious money on lawyers , and damaging their reputations and earning capabilities. I mean who will want to employ two soiled police scholars and an academic who proclaimed his academic integrity* when he was charged?
Then there was ex-Speaker of Parliament, “Mangoes for Laura” Palmer. True he wasn’t charged and never paid lawyers’ fees, but the guy was castrated in public: within a few hours he fell from “tua kee” to zero you-know-what.
Obviously, they didn’t do cost-benefit analysis. If they had been, they could have realised that the costs of being cheap on sex was higher than if they had paid for it. They would have realised that paying for sex was less risky for their careers and reputations. Based on legal fees of $500,000 a case (and I’m being conservative given the size of the legal teams), even if each man charged had sex 100 times (and the reports indicate that the frequency wasn’t that high), the cost would be $5,000 a session. And these were with aunties! Not slim, tall Vogue model-types.
If these senior public servants, didn’t use cost-benefit analysis on such an impt, personal matter, what are the chances that public servants use cost-benefit analysis when analysising or making decisions for us the masses? Yup, highly unlikely.
Anyway, these four cases illustrate the ancient Chinese saying of, “Kill a cock to frighten the monkeys”. Here four cocks were “killed’ to remind public servants that free sex is not a benefit of service. Never mind, public servants can afford to pay for sex, juz like they can afford to buy $5m to S10m apartments from a TLC, even when the TLC expresses concerns that it can sell some of these apartments. And if the MDA chairman and CEO may have problems with their personal cost-benefit analysis (what with QE possibly being reversed, with knock-on effects for S’pore property, and KepLand’s remarks on selling its apts), can ministers and the public trust that the MDA has done its cost-benefit analysis on its new media regulations? It could be telling that the Manpower minister replaced MDA’s CEO at a Talking Points programme on the issue of new media regulation? BTW, where was the water engineer**, Yaacob?
Note (Last three lines added two hrs after first publication, after reading FT etc)
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*I tot he was going to deny that he ever had sex with his student. It has been part of Western academic tradition since the times of the Greeks that sex with students was taboo. There was a lewd Roman joke that Socrates never had sex with Plato despite both being gay because Plato was Socrates’ pupil. The Romans didn’t do gay sex.
**See the * at end in link on what I mean by “water engineer”.
Cynical Investor
[Source]: Thoughts of a Cynical Investor (http://atans1.wordpress.com/).