24 October 2025
(1) INTRODUCTION
1. The Appellant, Mr Pritam Singh (“Mr Singh”), was convicted after trial of two charges of wilfully making a false answer to a question material to the subject of inquiry put during examination before the Committee of Privileges (“COP”), pursuant to Section 31(q) of the Parliament (Privileges, Immunities and Powers) Act 1962 (“PPIPA”): see Public Prosecutor v Pritam Singh [2025] SGDC 90 (“the GD”).1
2. This case arises from a lie told by Raeesah Khan during a parliamentary sitting on 3 August 2021. On 4 October 2021, she repeated the lie. On 1 November 2021 Ms Khan gave her Personal Explanation admitting to the lie. When she did so, she was questioned by the Leader of the House on the reasons why she chose to repeat the untruth in Parliament on 4 October 2021, and she had this to say:
“Ms Indranee Rajah: … So, I said that on 3 August. Two months later, when the Member was asked by the Minister for Home Affairs about this incident, which is two months’ time to reflect, why did the Member then repeat the untruth?
Ms Raeesah Khan: Thank you. Like I mentioned before, I think there were two things that were going through my mind. The first was that I really wanted to protect the identity of the survivor and the survivors in the women’s support group. And secondly, a lot of people did not know about this assault until very recently including my family. So, I was not ready at that point to come forward with this information. But after being able to have discussions with my family, with my friends and also informing the relevant people, it was it was clear that I wanted to make this apology; I wanted to make this personal explanation like I have done so today.”
3. A month later, the Committee of Privileges (“COP”) was set up to investigate Ms Khan’s actions. By then she had been ejected from the Workers’ Party. At the COP she changed her tune and sought to blame Mr Singh for maintaining the untruth.
4. Ms Khan’s attempts to shift the blame at the COP are not so unusual. Many a time those who have done wrong seek to deflect attention from themselves and onto others, particularly where doing so will lessen their own culpability. Ms Khan’s actions call to mind the events that Arthur Miller wrote about in the Crucible; perhaps it is salutary to heed the word of the protagonist John Proctor, when he called out the false accusations:2
“… Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God’s fingers? I’ll tell you what’s walking Salem – vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”
5. At the heart of the case lies a single question: did Mr Singh wilfully give false answers to the Committee of Privileges? The Prosecution said “yes” – yet failed to point to a single specific question or a single specific answer. Instead, the charges rested on a patchwork of words, loosely stitched together, retrofitted into a narrative that Mr Singh himself never gave. On this patchwork, the Principal District Judge Luke Tan (“the DJ”) convicted Mr Singh and imposed a fine of $7,000 for each of the two charges: see the GD at [5] and [653].3 To compound matters, the DJ convicted Mr Singh on the shifting stories of, frankly, incredible witnesses, filled evidential gaps with speculation, and imposed criminal liability based on assumptions.
Office of the Leader of the Opposition 