Unresting the case: Where is Parti's voice in this review?
Unresting the case: Where is Parti's voice in this review?
K Shanmugam's Ministerial Statement on Parti Liyani's case cast doubt on her innocence yet again. Let's unpack the "new evidence" he brings up, and journalist Chua Mui Hoong's response to it.
In his Ministerial Statement on 4 November 2020, Minister Shanmugam defended the AGC’s decision to prosecute Parti on the basis that they had found her untruthful and she had admitted to taking a few items. He also shares “new evidence” to try and make a case for how the Liews didn’t have improper motives in firing Parti, claiming that said motives were the High Court Judge’s primary grounds for acquitting her. But he doesn’t go on to clarify that the inconsistencies were accounted for in court as being due to serious problems with how Parti’s statements were taken. These systemic issues, and others, are explained by the Judge in his judgment papers, where he goes into detail about the many reasons for acquitting Parti.
Chua Mui Hoong's atrocious op-ed in The Straits Times on 6 November 2020 asserts that the "new evidence" Minister Shanmugam presented leads the people to ask if Parti is in fact guilty; whether the miscarriage of justice was against the Liews, rather than Parti; and if a guilty person got away "scot free" (wherein I suppose “scot free” means living in limbo, without work, for four years, at a shelter, and fighting a frightening and daunting battle in a foreign justice system where everyone speaks a language you don’t understand? ok, got it) while a police officer faces disciplinary actions and Karl Liew is charged with providing false evidence (tsk tsk, poor things, these two. Clearly, they are the real victims here!)
The Minister's "new evidence" included the accounts of an employment agent and members of the Liew family, who seem to have been interviewed as part of the review process. Meanwhile Parti has not been invited or allowed to provide a response/clarifications to any of their assertions, or to make her own assertions. So let's examine all the points from the Ministerial Statement that Chua’s op-ed reaffirms as "new evidence", but this time, we’ll include Parti’s perspective.
(My representations of Parti's accounts below, where I refer to them, are a combination of what she has said during police investigations, under oath in court, and also to her lawyer/volunteers at HOME who have supported her through this process.)
Parti admitted to taking 10-15 items of male clothing.
This is not new evidence. This issue was presented and discussed in court, and Parti was acquitted of the relevant charges nevertheless. Parti has explained on multiple instances that the practice in the Liew household was that Mr Liew Mun Leong would discard his unwanted clothes in a pile on the floor, and that Mrs Liew would take from that what she wanted to keep, following which Karl Liew would take from it what he wanted, and Mrs Liew had told Parti that she could take what she wanted of the remaining clothes, once she and Karl had taken their pick. She had asked for consent the first time she took these items into her possession. What Parti meant when she said she didn't ask for permission to take these specific items was that when she was packing her boxes after being fired, she didn't ask for consent again. Maybe if her perspective had been included in the review, she could have clarified this for the Minister and everyone else.
The Liews' decision to terminate her was not sudden, nor was it due to confrontations about her illegal deployment to clean Karl Liew’s house. It was based on ongoing suspicions of theft, namely about a power bank that went missing almost 6 months prior to the date she was fired. They started looking for a replacement then, and fired her once they found someone. Chua claims that Justice Chan acquitted Parti because of possible "improper motives" of the Liew family in bringing allegations of theft against her. So if they didn’t have improper motives after all, as Minister Shanmugam has determined, Parti may in fact be guilty.
First of all, Parti was not acquitted (at least, not solely) based on the finding that the Liews might have had improper motives in accusing her of theft. Justice Chan raises this possibility in his judgment papers, but he provides a long and thorough explanation of the grounds of his decision to acquit Parti, and these include the breaks in chain of evidence, the unreliability of Karl Liew's testimony, and the issues with the way Parti’s police statements were recorded, among others. Even if the Liews did not have improper motives (and I believe they did), it does not undermine the basis of the acquittal, because the decision did not turn on the judge finding that the Liews had improper motives.
More importantly, Justice Chan found - after listening to testimonies from all concerned parties, deliberating over the arguments and submissions by their lawyers, and reviewing all other facts of the case - that due to the closeness of dates between the day Parti refused to clean Karl Liew's toilet and the day she was fired, that illegal deployment was a more likely "trigger event" for firing her than earlier suspicions of theft, which the Liews brought up in court too. In other words, the Judge did not believe their explanation that they fired her because of longstanding suspicions of theft, or at least, that this was the primary reason for firing her. The judge is highly trained, experienced and qualified to make these considered judgments, through a rigorous process, based on extensive information provided at the trial, which neither Minister Shanmugam nor any of the rest of us were privy to in full. But hey, Minister Shanmugam and Chua Mui Hoong apparently believe the Liews - that's what counts, right? And they believe it, I guess, simply because the Liews said so?
Chua muses in her op-ed that in light of this “new evidence” presented in parliament, “ironically, the niggling feeling over a possible miscarriage of justice may prevail, although directed towards a different target”. But what I find to be the real irony is that she writes a piece that postures as if it is making thoughtful comments about the implicit bias of police officers, prosecutors and judges may have to believe a rich and well-connected family over a domestic worker, but she does exactly this in her piece, when she takes at face value the Liews’ claims and Minister Shanmugam’s claims that the Liews fired Parti because of pre-existing suspicions of theft, and so easily calls Parti’s innocence into question. She, too, I might add, did not seek to interview Parti or experts on the case, like Dr Stephanie Chok, before writing her op-ed.
So what’s Parti’s stance on these points? Parti has said that in her 8 year-long employment with the Liews, no allegation of theft was ever raised with her prior to the police report. She has said that every time she asked for a transfer, Mrs Liew refused, saying she likes Parti and wants her to stay on. Each time her contract ended, it was renewed, with an increase in pay. Her contract was last renewed in 2015, the same year that Minister Shanmugam said the Liews had suspected her of theft and spoke to an agency about a replacement.
In court, Karl Liew said his father shared with the family his suspicions of Parti stealing from them two years before she was fired, so at least from 2014. But if so, why renew her contract each time it expired, raise her pay, and refuse her requests for transfer?
In the defense team’s submissions, they pointed out that on the day she was fired, Parti asked Mrs Liew if she wanted to check her bags before she left, and Mrs Liew declined. They also pointed out that Parti carried the Longchamp bag – which Mr Liew later claimed she stole - out of the house, in full view of Mrs Liew, Karl Liew and the employment agent. No one stopped her, asked her about it, or reacted to this in any other manner. After she left, Mrs Liew talks about calling the karang guni man to remove the boxes, and Karl Liew replies, “Ma, you cannot get the karang guni man here. It’s still her things, Mum.”
Moreover, Mr Liew Mun Leong, whom all the family members said was the one who primarily suspected Parti of theft and made the decision to fire her, was overseas when Parti was terminated. If his suspicions of her theft were longstanding, why did he go to the effort to orchestrate her termination while he was out of the country? What was the sudden urgency? Fun fact: there were serious discrepancies in Mr Liew’s police statement too! And lucky for him, the statements were taken in a language he is proficient in. When questioned on this, Mr Liew said that statements given to the police are not “memo to the cabinet or something like this, you tend to make mistakes”. Another fun fact: Liew Mun Leong filed the police report on 30 Oct 2016 after he spent a “few minutes, half an hour, I don’t know”, looking through the boxes on 29 October 2016. In that time, according to his First Information Report, he was able to identify 9 groups of items, and their value, which he claimed was around $15,000.
Liew Mun Leong’s witness testimony from the Notes of Evidence, Day 9, State Court trial, taken from https://partiliyani.weebly.com/
It seems reasonable to believe, as the judge did, that there must have been a trigger event, even though Minister Shanmugam accepts the Liews’ account that they were merely waiting for the replacement domestic worker to arrive before firing Parti.
It’s notable that the Liew family members did not testify that any items went missing in the days or weeks before Parti was fired. The only point of conflict/contention in the days before Parti was fired was the illegal deployment to Karl Liew’s house, and Parti’s refusal to continue with that arrangement. And the (roughly) two weeks between the confrontation and her termination is sufficient time for the family to have found a replacement.
On the day she was fired, Parti threatened to complain to MOM about being sent home on short notice, not about illegal deployment.
I find this one the most perplexing, as a reason to cast doubt on Parti’s innocence, or clear the Liews of “improper motives”. Firstly, what’s important is that there was reason - any reason - for the family members to fear being reported, therefore providing an incentive to pre-emptively file a complaint against her, and to try to prevent her for returning to Singapore. It does not make any material difference whether she said she would complain about being terminated on short notice, or about illegal deployment. It is entirely possible that the Liews feared that upon making a report of termination on short notice, Parti would be interviewed by MOM, and in the course of the interview, also bring up the issue of her illegal deployment, especially because she had so recently complained to Mrs Liew about being deployed to clean Karl Liew’s home and refused to continue this arrangement, leading to a disagreement wherein Parti said it was only proper for them to hire someone else to do this. It was very clearly a fresh grievance Parti harboured and had raised with them, so it is not at all improbable that the Liews worried she would report them for this, regardless of whether she revealed an explicit intention to do so.
Again, what is Parti’s account of all this? Parti has maintained that she was upset about the abrupt termination and vocalised this when she was asked to pack her things and leave in two hours. Separately, she said that she wanted to make a complaint about her employers, but she did not link the two points. According to Minister Shanmugam, an employment agent who was present when Parti was fired said (it appears this person was interviewed as part of the internal review conducted by the police/AGC. Once again, I have to ask, why wasn’t Parti interviewed?) that Parti claimed she would complain about the abrupt termination. But Parti does not agree with this version of events. She stands by her assertion that she made both of those statements separately.
It is also not at all necessary or logical for Parti to make explicit her intention to report the Liews for illegal deployment. It is in her interest to be circumspect about her intentions, so that she can make this decision independently, and without fear of repercussions/retaliation from the Liews. Minister Shanmugam stated that the employment agent offered twice to help Parti lodge a complaint to MOM, but she declined, as if this should make us question her intentions to do so. Parti says that she was asked once, and she replied that there was no need for the agent’s assistance; if she wants to complain, she will do it herself.
Another related point which Chua’s article does not directly refer to, but which Minister Shanmugam made in his Ministerial Statement (and which went on to be highlighted in other news articles) is that the Liews filing a report couldn’t and didn’t prevent her from returning to Singapore to complain to MOM; therefore, that couldn’t have been their motivation in filing the police report. Shanmugam accepted that Mr Liew made the report "for record purposes", because he was worried that Ms Parti's boyfriends might break into their home (….and so, that must be the truth. Sigh.)
It is common knowledge that domestic workers may be blacklisted by MOM based on police reports filed by employers or employers’ negative feedback left on the MOM website. At the very least, it’s a commonly-held belief among employers that they have the power to do this. So it is entirely reasonable for the Liews to have believed that they could severely jeopardise her chances of securing a work permit by pre-emptively filing a case against her.
Parti tried to return to Singapore on a social visit pass - not a work permit - to look for another employer. But she was arrested at the airport and detained immediately. So she was, in fact, prevented from returning to work in Singapore, based on their police report.
Moreover, the Liews had the first word, when it came to complaints/reports, not her. Since she had to leave the very day they fired her and cancelled her work permit, she could only have made her complaint to MOM about the illegal deployment or any other matter after she returned, by which time they had made the police report, and her credibility would be called into question. They could also have believed that being investigated by the police would intimidate and deter her from making her own complaint about their conduct. So that motive – to have the first word/upper hand, and to attempt to have her blacklisted – very much makes sense.
Some words speak louder than other words…
And finally, on this topic, it is clear that Minister Shanmugam, and some who reported on his Parliamentary Statement, like Chua Mui Hoong, have effectively thrown shade on Parti’s acquittal without taking direct responsibility for any doubt they plant in people’s minds.
Chua says in her article that many Singaporeans will ask if Parti is in fact guilty, that they will wonder if she got away scot free. Did Chua Mui Hoong conduct a poll? Because a simple temperature-taking, based on the comments sections of news articles covering the Minister’s statement, would show that the people are frustrated by the lack of accountability, and saddened that Parti is being dragged through the coals again. Any keen observer (or even not-so-keen observer…) could deduce that the people are not buying any of it. So why is Chua Mui Hoong speaking for the people, and determining what public opinion is so prematurely? Is she hiding behind “the people” when in fact, she’s just sharing her own views?
And for his part, Minister Shanmugam has stated that the “new evidence” he was presenting was untested in court, but that he was nevertheless duty bound to go through the facts that arose out of further investigations into the Liews’ conduct. I don’t believe him, not one bit. Because any sincere investigation into the Liews’ conduct should have involved speaking to Parti, but to this date, she has not been approached. And the Minister was not “duty bound” to accept the Liews’ account of things at face value, or present their claims as facts (especially after the judge has dismissed some of these claims, which are not at all new or untested. Rather, they were tested in court and found to be untrue). Just saying that you’re not reopening the issue isn’t enough. You have to actually not reopen it. Otherwise it looks like a sneaky tactic to throw shade while pretending not to.
And perhaps most importantly, nobody asked the Minister to collect evidence about the Liews’ motivations. That was the job of the lawyers who argued this case in court, and a matter for the High Court judge to decide on, which, in my view, is a job he did very well.
What we, the people, asked Minister Shanmugam and the relevant departments to do, rather, was to be accountable for the lapses in police investigations, the AGC’s decision-making process, and the public prosecutors’ conduct in court. We asked for there to be changes made to principles and practices at various levels of the criminal justice system that would assure us that we’re moving towards fairer processes that protects the rights of vulnerable people. We expressed concern about Parti’s case, but also broader patterns that were coming to light, and hoped for wider reforms. But instead, Minister Shanmugam dedicated a significant part of his investigations and statement to defending the Liews and clearing their name from accusations of improper motives. Why? It is not the role of our elected representatives to defend the conduct of private citizens in Parliament, when they are gathered to purportedly discuss systemic issues and reforms. And not one word spared in a 2.5 hour long statement for the domestic worker who spent four difficult years fighting to prove her innocence, against all odds, at great cost to herself. Instead, he implied she wasn’t innocent after all. Why? Is this what should convince us that our systems and leaders are blind to status?
Photo credit: Grace Baey
Also read…
I did a Twitter thread yesterday about the problems with how police statements were taken from Parti Liyani, based on a compelling, well-researched article by Dr Stephanie Chok about language barriers, in response to Minister Shanmugam’s comments on inconsistencies in Parti’s statements.
For dedicated reporting about the Parti Liyani case, check out https://partiliyani.weebly.com/.
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