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Moving On

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Business Times reports former Member of Parliament (MP) Cynthia Phua has just joined real estate consultancy Knight Frank Singapore as its executive director of retail services. Madam Phua was once a general manager of NTUC Fairprice Co-operative's real estate business unit, the partisan employer who has a proclivity to provide jobs for party stewards like Desmond Choo (deputy director of industrial relations and the National Transport Workers Union) and Ong Ye Kung (former deputy secretary-general).

Singapore's first woman full minister and former minister in the Prime Minister's Office, Lim Hwee Hua's third posting since leaving politics was independent non-executive director with Ernst & Young's Global Advisory Council. She also joined private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts as adviser (October 2011) and Jardine Cycle & Carriage as non-executive director (July 2011).

Phua and Lim were part of the team that was turfed out of Aljunied in the May 2011 General Elections. Phua and Lim were also partners of a shameful episode in May 2009.

The 17-year-old boy may have been intellectually challenged, but even with his low IQ he could sense his mother was shabbily treated when she approached the MP for an appeal to the HDB which was in the process of repossessing her flat. Phua was standing in for Lim, then travelling abroad on some junket. The low EQ MP added injury to injury (he suffers from thalassemia, a blood disorder that renders him weak and sickly) when she addressed him aggressively: "Who are you? What are you doing? Why aren't you working?"

He expressed his frustration on the way out by slamming a folding chair against an inanimate glass door, but not sufficiently violent to break it or cost expensive damage. That night the police arrested him.

A week later, mother brought a hand written apology from his son to Lim, back from her overseas trip, begging for mercy. Lim, alien to the milk of human kindness, was not moved: "'I made it very clear to (the mother) that this is unacceptable behaviour. It is not justifiable in any circumstance. There's no excuse to be violent."

If there was a follow up to The New Paper report , it can't be well distributed. Lim  and Phua may have moved on, but the fate of the youth, and her mother struggling to survive on her cleaner salary of $400 a month, probably did not warrant a mention in the mainstream media.


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