Lust caution: Sex scandals in S'pore

The higher they climb, the harder they fall. And the more interest and curiosity aroused in members of the public.

Last year became a banner year for sex scandals involving top civil servants, politicians and teachers, fuelling coffee shop talk for months on end. Let's not kid ourselves: Sex sells.

Sex and corruption? Even more so when it happens outside the sanctity of marriage in squeakyclean Singapore.

When it comes to covering scandals, The New Paper has always been, well, on top.

Local actor-director Jack Neo, then 50, got the ball rolling in March 2010, when freelance model- actress Wendy Chong, then 22, blew the lid off their two-year affair.

It naturally caused an unprecedented uproar.

TNP was the first to bring the exposé to English newspaper readers, following up with exclusive interviews with Neo, his wife Irene Kng, and Miss Chong.

As if having a mistress half his age was not bad enough, the saga took on a more salacious dimension when other women - including wannabe singer-actress Foyce Le Xuan and French student Maelle Meurzec - claimed how Neo allegedly persistently hit on them six years ago.

Both claimed they rebuffed his unwelcome advances. The fallout was equally dramatic.

During a four-minute press conference held a week later to address the fiasco, Neo and his wife broke down and sobbed, with Madam Kng eventually collapsing in a heap.

Neo told TNP in 2010: "I know that I must do better and spend more time and effort to do more with regard to work, bonding with my family and my wife's feelings."

His efforts paid off, as his marriage and relationship with his children became stronger.

Neo wasn't the only public figure who was tripped up and dragged through the mud.

Even Members of Parliament (MPs) weren't spared, and TNP had the inside stories.

In January last year, we were the first to report on a raging online debate over whether rising opposition star Yaw Shin Leong, the Workers' Party MP for Hougang SMC, had an affair with a married party colleague.

When asked point blank about it at a Meet-the-People Session, Mr Yaw, then 35, and his wife Lau Wang Lin declined to comment, while the third party insisted she would neither confirm nor deny the allegations.

TNP provided another tipping point with the report that Mr Yaw was linked to a married tuition teacher from China who assisted him with translation work and who claimed to have had a "short" relationship with him.

Expelled

His unremitting silence became so deafening that the Workers' Party eventually expelled him for repeatedly refusing to come clean - which was against the party's standards of transparency and accountability.

Mr Yaw and his wife exited the political scene and left the country soon after.

People's Action Party's (PAP) Michael Palmer, former Speaker of Parliament and Punggol East SMC MP, also saw his political career end in ignominy after his own affair was exposed.

On Dec 12 last year, the 44-year-old married man with a 10-year-old son admitted to his yearlong relationship with People's Association constituency director Laura Ong. He announced his resignation to "avoid further embarrassment" to the PAP and Parliament, and to take full responsibility for his grave mistake.

Four days earlier, he had met Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean, where he confessed and offered to resign.

It was the same day TNP received screen grabs of intimate text messages and e-mail exchanges between Mr Palmer and Ms Ong, 33, from an anonymous source.

One e-mail showed a forwarded message with the subject "Your booking at Fairmont Singapore" and another contained a picture of a Dior handbag that Mr Palmer purportedly gave Ms Ong.

Ms Ong, who quit her job on Dec 10, was separated from her husband and was dating a logistics manager during the affair.

Both scandals triggered by-elections for their SMC seats in Parliament, which saw Workers' Party candidates Png Eng Huat and Lee Li Lian winning for Hougang and Punggol East, respectively.

Click on thumbnail to view (Photos: SPH, Internet)

TNP was also first to break the "sex-for-grades" scandal in July last year, in which National University of Singapore law professor and former district judge Tey Tsun Hang was being investigated for corruptly obtaining gratification in the form of gifts and sex from his 23-year-old student Darinne Ko in exchange for better grades.

He faced six charges in court.

The gifts included a Mont Blanc fountain pen, an iPod Touch and two tailored shirts, while the sex took place in his office in July 2010.

The Raffles Girls' School and Raffles Institution alumnus and Tey broke up in September 2010 when he visited her at Duke University in the US, where she was doing an exchange programme, because her parents had found out about the affair.

Tey is married and has a teenage daughter.

In his defence, he has tried to show that he and Ms Ko were in a "mutually loving relationship", that he never tampered with her grades and that he had never asked for the "gifts of love".

Ms Ko also denied in court that Tey took advantage of her or showed her any favour should she give him an inducement, adding that she bought him gifts because they were dating.

He was eventually found guilty of all counts and started his five-month jail sentence in June 2013.

Then there were the "sex-for-contracts" trials.

In January last year, a probe was underway involving two top-ranking civil servants - Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) commissioner Peter Lim and Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) director Ng Boon Gay.

Mr Ng, 46, faced four charges of corruptly obtaining oral sex from former IT sales manager Cecilia Sue, 36, in exchange for furthering the business interests of her companies Hitachi Data Systems and Oracle Corporation Singapore between June and December 2011.

Both companies provided IT products to government agencies, including CNB.

Ms Sue, who's married with a three year- old daughter, testified in court that she was coerced into the sexual relationship but she never asked him for any business favours.

But the defence maintained that she and Mr Ng were in an intimate three-year relationship, with Mr Ng claiming they engaged in oral sex 20 to 30 times and had sexual intercourse once.

But perhaps what people remember best out of this case were the couple's sexually suggestive text messages like: Mr Ng: My SP has a chip, it's in your body now. (SP stood for sperm.) Ms Sue: "Do you DIY?" (DIY meant masturbation.)

Throngs of smitten male gawkers waited outside the Subordinate Courts during the trial, hoping to catch a glimpse of the attractive Ms Sue.

Mr Ng was acquitted of all charges.

On the other hand, Lim, 52, faced 10 counts of corruptly accepting sex from three women executives in exchange for help to advance their companies’ business interests in 2010.

One of the women was Ms Pang Chor Mui, 49, who was the general manager of Nimrod Engineering, a vendor to SCDF.

The remaining nine charges — involving Ms Esther Goh, business development director of information technology firm NCS, and Ms Lee Wei Hoon, director of technology company Singapore Radiation Centre — were stood down or taken into consideration.

While the prosecution charged that the married Lim had corruptly obtained oral sex in May 2010 from Ms Pang, which was linked to a tender that Nimrod bid for in April 2011, the defence countered that the two were friends and their flirting resulted in the one-off sexual encounter in her car.

But perhaps what was most memorable, again, were the lurid details that emerged during the trial.

For instance, Lim said he was “never interested” in having sex with Ms Pang and did so “out of sympathy” after she “so pitifully begged” him for it after they had lunch earlier that year.

Lim was found guilty and started his six-month jail term in June this year

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