THE trial hearing of Workers’ Party (WP) chief Pritam Singh was adjourned on Oct 21 following a testy exchange between the prosecution and defence over whether redacted messages of former WP cadre Yudhishthra Nathan were relevant to the proceedings and should be tendered in court.
Singh’s lawyer Andre Jumabhoy is seeking the unredacted version of Nathan’s message logs from Oct 4 to 12, 2021. He is also asking for the redacted version of these messages given to the Committee of Privileges (COP) and the reasons for these redactions.
Jumabhoy said this is a reasonable line of inquiry as it goes directly to whether the testimonies of Nathan and his fellow WP cadre Loh Pei Ying, who testified last week, are credible.
“I’m not here to challenge the findings of the COP… (but) these witnesses’ credibility is very much an issue,” he added.
Deputy attorney-general Ang Cheng Hock objected, arguing that the COP’s findings and the redacted messages are not relevant to the criminal trial at hand, and that Jumabhoy is seeking to show that the witnesses hid evidence and “manipulated” the COP into making certain findings.
Addressing deputy principal district judge Luke Tan, Ang said the defence is “inviting Your Honour to go into the integrity of the COP process”. He added: “What will they do with (that)? They will use it for whatever purposes they want. That is the only finding that can come out of this exercise.”
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After hearing both sides, the judge said he would review the message logs alongside evidence from Nathan before making a decision.
Singh is fighting two charges over his alleged lies to the committee convened to investigate former Sengkang GRC MP Raeesah Khan’s untruth in Parliament.
Khan had, on Aug 3, 2021, told Parliament how she had accompanied a sexual assault victim to a police station, where the victim was treated insensitively. She repeated the claim before the House on Oct 4 the same year, before admitting to her lie on Nov 1, 2021.
Singh is alleged to have lied to the committee that after a meeting on Aug 8 that year between him, Khan and WP leaders Sylvia Lim and Faisal Manap, he wanted Khan to clarify in Parliament the untruth she had told days before on Aug 3.
The WP chief is also alleged to have provided false testimony that at a meeting with Khan on Oct 3 that year, he had asked her to come clean about her lie if the issue was brought up in the House the next day.
The messages at the centre of the defence’s application were sent after Oct 4, 2021. During the exchange between the defence and the prosecution, judge Tan acknowledged that they might relate to the testimonies of Nathan and Loh about their meeting with Singh on the night of Oct 12, 2021.
The court earlier heard that this Oct 12 meeting was when Singh told Loh and Nathan that he had met Khan on Oct 3, 2021, and told her that he would not judge her.
In recounting what happened on Oct 12 that year, Nathan told the court Singh said “verbatim ‘I will not judge you’”.
“The issue of their credibility, especially leading up to the 12th, even on the 12th, is an issue because it goes to whether their evidence is to be believed or not,” judge Tan said.
However, the judge made it clear that he would not make any findings about the COP’s proceedings because they were not relevant to this trial.
Singh’s case will be heard again at 11 am on Oct 22, with the judge due to make a decision on the defence’s application, and former WP secretary-general Low Thia Khiang lined up as the next witness to testify. Jumabhoy said he would likely complete his cross-examination of Nathan within an hour.
‘So relevant you decided to take it out’
Just before Nathan had to leave the courtroom for the application to be made, he was cross-examined on his message to Khan on Oct 12, 2021. In the message, he had suggested that she “not give too many details (and) at most apologise for not having the facts about her age accurate”.
Nathan had redacted this message in the evidence he submitted to the COP in December 2021.
Asked why he chose to redact the message, Nathan insisted that he thought the message was immaterial at that time.
It was his view that the COP was interested in the involvement of party leaders, he added.
When pressed on whether he redacted the message because of the reality that it shows him “in a bad light”, Nathan said he partially agreed. However, he added: “I think if people understood my state of mind when I had sent that message then… they might have come to a different conclusion.”
Later, Jumabhoy said the COP had specified that it needed to see “the trail” of messages. “You can’t just cherry-pick the messages, they want to see the whole trail,” he told Nathan.
Jumabhoy then put it to Nathan that he knew “full well” that the message was relevant, posing to him: “It was so relevant that you decided to take it out.”
When Nathan denied this, Jumabhoy reiterated his case, stating: “If it was a completely irrelevant message, you won’t waste your time and effort to redact it, you would have overlooked it.”
The lawyer also said: “Clearly, you took it out because you thought it was highly relevant. And clearly you took it out because it makes you look bad.”
Nathan disagreed with both statements.
He also disagreed that his motive for not disclosing the information was because he had wanted to mislead the COP.
Earlier in the day, Jumabhoy wasted no time to paint Nathan as the “man behind the scenes” or the one “pulling the strings” as soon as his cross-examination of the witness began.
Pointing out that the description was first used on Nathan by Minister for Culture, Community and Youth Edwin Tong, who led the COP, Jumabhoy said the term “man behind the scenes” suggested that he was “the one pulling the strings”, and asked if he agreed. Nathan said “no”.
When probed by Jumabhoy on what the lawyer described as a “seminal” moment, Nathan said he could not recall the circumstances around the suggestion he had given Khan about not providing too many details about the anecdote in her lie, and just clarifying the purported victim’s age. THE STRAITS TIMES