High Court upholds Pritam Singh’s conviction

For two months after he found out that then Sengkang MP Raeesah Khan had lied in Parliament, Workers’ Party chief and Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh did not intend for her to set the record straight.

- Vanessa Paige Chelvan Correspondent

Having been confronted on Aug 7, 2021, with the inconvenient truth of a sitting MP from his party having told an unsolicited lie, Mr Singh had hoped that he would not have to deal with it, and was essentially engaged in an exercise of risk assessment and damage control, the High Court found on Dec 4, 2025.

Justice of the Court of Appeal Steven Chong said that even after Mr Singh decided on Oct 11, 2021, that Ms Khan should clarify her untruth, it was never his position that she should come clean regardless of whether the issue was raised in Parliament again or whether it was discovered by the Government.

In a 78-page judgment released after he dismissed the appeal, Justice Chong said Mr Singh's case, at best, was that he wanted Ms Khan to come clean if the issue was raised again in Parliament.

If it was not, Mr Singh’s approach “would have been to let sleeping dogs lie — that there was no need to resurrect the issue if it was already 'buried'”, the judge noted. “Alas, that was not to be.”

On Dec 4, in a hearing that lasted less than 10 minutes, Justice Chong said he found the trial judge’s decision to convict Mr Singh of both charges to be supported by the evidence, and upheld Mr Singh’s Feb 17 conviction on two counts of lying to the Committee of Privileges (COP).

The substance of both charges was that Mr Singh did not intend for Ms Khan to clarify her untruth, and Mr Singh had given false testimony to the COP by claiming that he did, said Justice Chong.

The charges fell within the two-month period where Mr Singh “took no obvious step to get Ms Khan to reveal the truth”, he added in his judgment.