Certainly more than 21 days have gone by since Lee Hsien Loong called for a Ministry of National Development (MND) inquiry in January on the problematic Action Information Management (AIM) saga. The inactivity only prompts others to ask more basic questions like: “As AIM is a company that was set up by members of the PAP, is it in the public interest to task a Ministry that is headed by the chairman of the PAP to assess the integrity of its transactions?”
If you go further back to the December note by Teo Ho Pin on the sorry episode, more time have been wasted. Enough time for characters involved to cover their tracks. People like the high achiever (Deputy Director, Enterprise Software Group of NCS Pte Ltd) who used to boast in his LinkedIn CV that the deal with Chandra Das' $2 outfit amounted to as much as $30 million from the Singapore Town Council, and included a software licence hitting $5 million.
It is taking so long, a new deal worth $16 million has been awarded to Japanese firm NEC Asia Pacific in April. The subject who should have been under the microscope of the MND, Teo Ho Pin, was allowed to splurge more millions on software from the Town Council funds. Teo said, “The new system is more cost-effective, thus saving maintenance cost for town councils and our residents." Is that a confession that the old system was not cost -effective, and a sheer waste of money collected from the residents?"
For sheer tardiness, the investigation of Shane Todd's death in June 2012 has to be a new record setter. It took the February 2013 report of the Financial Times newspaper to dig spurs into the local police to come up with a better explanation. Even with US Senators piling on the pressure, the State Coroner has scheduled the inquiry only to start on May 13, 2013. Lots of powerful people seem to be taking their own sweet time. Maybe their equally powerful paychecks should be suspended until the answers are forthcoming. For these guys, it's not simply another day, another dollar. It's more like another day, another $1,000 in the bank.