I did not deceive my father, says PM Lee

SINGAPORE — Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Tuesday (July 4) refuted his siblings’ latest accusation that he had misled their late father into believing that the family home at 38 Oxley Road was already gazetted by the Government.

Responding to a question by Member of Parliament (Tampines GRC) Cheng Li Hui, PM Lee said on the second day of a parliamentary debate that it “can never be a private allegation” when they claim that as the Prime Minister, he had deceived their father, the late founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

“It has enormous ramifications for my standing and reputation, and the matter has to be answered,” he said. 

“The simple answer is that I didn’t deceive my father,” PM Lee added. 

On Monday, PM Lee reiterated that their father’s primary wish for their house had always been clear — he wanted it knocked down. Where he and his siblings — Mr Lee Hsien Yang and Dr Lee Wei Ling — differed was whether their father was prepared to consider other options should demolition not be possible, he said on Tuesday.  

After Mr Lee Kuan Yew met the Cabinet on July 21, 2011, he had asked PM Lee for his view on what the Government would do with the house after he died. 

PM Lee gave his “honest assessment”: “If I (chair) the Cabinet meeting, given that these are the views of the ministers and the public, I think it will be very hard for me to override them and knock the house down. I would have to agree that the house has to be gazetted, to be kept. And if I’m not the PM, or I don’t chair the meeting, all the more likely that the house would be gazetted. He (my father) understood.”

After the house was bequeathed to him a month later, PM Lee and his wife Ho Ching came up with the proposal — should demolition not be allowed — to renovate the home and redo the private areas, but keeping intact the basement dining room where many important meetings had been held to discuss matters affecting the country. 

Issuing two documents containing email exchanges with his family in Parliament on Tuesday, PM Lee said that these showed how his wife kept the whole family informed of the renovation proposal and its progress. 

“The conservation plan was done honestly, transparently and not on false pretences,” he said.

A day after PM Lee gave his Ministerial Statement to address his siblings’ allegations that he was preventing them from carrying out their father’s wishes to tear down the house, Mr Lee Hsien Yang and Dr Lee on Tuesday said that their older brother had made “convoluted, but ultimately false, claims” in Parliament on Monday, and alleged that PM Lee is suggesting that their father was open to the preservation of the house “just because he signed some renovation plans in early 2012”.

The pair also claimed that the discussion on the proposed renovation was “instigated by (PM Lee) representing that the house would be inevitably gazetted (or had already been gazetted)”, and not because Mr Lee Kuan Yew “accepted” the preservation.

On Tuesday, PM Lee reiterated that after his father died, he told Parliament on April 13, 2015, that the Government would take no decision on the house as long as Dr Lee was living in it. 

It was best if the “major decision” was postponed till a calmer time, given that people were still very emotional about Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s passing.  

“That was why I said what I did in Parliament. I see it in no way contradicting my father’s wishes or (my advice to him) when he was alive,” he added.