Singapore sends eight civil servants to police over homes near unannounced MRT stops
Coordinating minister Chan Chun Sing told parliament on Tuesday that eight civil servants have been referred to police after a review of 191 officers. A US working paper said officials were 60 percent more likely to buy near MRT stations before the stations were announced, in deals worth about S$270 million.
Singapore2 min read
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Singapore has referred eight civil servants to the police over property buys near planned rail stations that had not yet been announced. Coordinating minister for public services Chan Chun Sing told parliament on Tuesday that a referral is not a finding of wrongdoing. He said the government does not have the information it would need to close the cases without a police look.
The review covered property transactions by 191 civil servants from 2007 to 2014. It began after a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, written by economists at Stanford, Columbia and the University of Hong Kong, reported that Singaporean civil servants were 60 percent more likely than others to buy homes in areas where a Mass Rapid Transit station was still secret. The paper put purchases by officials and relatives near those future stations at about S$270 million, roughly $210 million. It counted 113 buys by civil servants in the two years before an announcement, and 108 by relatives in the three years before an announcement. The gains, the authors said, were concentrated among mid-level officials linked to public transport planning.
Chan's line in parliament was the rule the service is supposed to live by. Public officers must never use information from their official duties to advance their own private interests, or anyone else's. He said the integrity of the service and the public trust in it are fundamental, and that allegations of misuse have to be taken seriously and also tested on evidence. The government had earlier said any wrongdoing would go to the corruption bureau. On Tuesday the path named in the chamber was the police.
The design of an MRT announcement is what makes the paper's claim sharp. A station on a map, once published, lifts the value of flats within walking distance. A station that is still inside a planning file does the same thing only for the people who have seen the file. A 60 percent higher likelihood of buying in those pockets, if it survives a police check against the actual name list, is hard to explain as taste. It is also not, by itself, a charge. Officers buy homes. Relatives buy homes. The offence, if there is one, is the use of a non-public alignment.
Eight names out of 191 reviewed is a narrow funnel. Chan did not read the names in the chamber. He did not say which lines or which years. The paper's window closes in 2014, so the referrals are about transactions that are more than a decade old. That does not make them trivial in a city where the civil service's reputation is a political asset. It does mean witnesses, bank records and old planning files have to be rebuilt.
The next public fact will be whether any of the eight is charged, and under which statute. Until then the parliamentary record holds a referral, a denial that guilt has been established, and a research paper that put a dollar figure on a pattern the ministry could not explain away.
