Flashback

I remember chatting about this mindlessly on the way home in my colleague's car last Monday or Tuesday.

I thought the questioners were competing with each other to praise Singapore as the success story of globalisation. Actually, Singapore’s success came mainly from being the money laundering center for corrupt Indonesian businessmen and government officials. Indonesia has no money. So Singapore isn’t doing well. To sustain its economy, Singapore is building casinos to attract corrupt money from China.

The above is an excerpt from an email that was meant for internal circulation within Morgan Stanley by Andy Xie which led to this Chief Economist from being "asked to leave" his job as well the jobs of two other employees who allegedly were the ones who leaked the email to the public. Now contrast it with an Australian news article that came out in July this year:

A corollary of Singapore's reluctance to sign an extradition treaty with Indonesia is its apparent lack of fussiness about the sources of the funds attracted to its banking sector.

Singaporean officials make all the right noises when it comes to monitoring illicit funds. But there is a perception that in practice Singapore is not fully meeting international expectations and obligations. One person involved in monitoring international money flows for a Western government told me last week that the results of Singapore's efforts to date were disappointing.

And a senior fund manager in the region had this to say: "Singapore has truly become the global centre for parking ill-gotten gains. The private banking teams are huge and in practice ask almost no questions (compared with the branches elsewhere, including Switzerland).

You know? Fuck that. If there's money to be made there, I hope I won't be in a dilemma. Oh and notice nobody actually sued the paper. Remember what our government said?

If you don't sue, repetition of the lie [makes it credible]. It will be believed....

"We have to act because they are alleging corruption," Lee said. "If we do not act, and the lies and defamation are repeated throughout and in election rallies and spread around, I think the government's reputation goes down."