Oxley Road items discovered while tidying house, Lee siblings informed: Ho Ching

SINGAPORE – A day after Mr Lee Hsien Yang accused her of collecting several items belonging to his late father without permission, his sister-in-law, Madam Ho Ching, said in her first public remarks on the family dispute that all along she had kept Mr Lee and Dr Lee Wei Ling informed of what she was doing.

Mr Lee had earlier alleged that Mdm Ho “helped herself” to the items and handed them “to the NHB (ostensibly on loan) under the auspices of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO)”. In response, Mdm Ho, who is the wife of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, said on Friday (Jun 23) that she had arranged to donate the items to the National Heritage Board (NHB) through the PMO, “emphasising to NHB that these items belonged to the estate and must be returned”.

Referring to the period after Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s funeral, Mdm Ho said: “You may wish to check your email records to refresh your memory on the various updates that I had given you during those 2 weeks.”

Commenting on one of Mr Lee Hsien Yang’s several Facebook posts on the dispute on Friday, Mdm Ho also urged him to move on, as the spat continued to rage on more than a week after PM Lee’s younger siblings had put up a lengthy public statement on the matter.

Mdm Ho said: “I hope that whatever you are upset about, you will have the heart to remember what papa and mama would have wanted most for the family and for Singapore.”

She recalled how, following the funeral on Mar 29, 2015, she began tidying up the family home at 38 Oxley Road. Noting that Mr Lee Hsien Yang and his wife Lee Suet Fern had at that time gone “for a break in Japan or somewhere”, she said that she was “cleaning up stuff in the basement, and organising items, dogsbody work as I mentioned to you before, which I couldn’t see Ling or Fern doing,” in reference to Dr Lee and Mrs Lee.  

“This was what I had also done at papa’s request after mama’s death. Ling was in Oxley, and I had kept her posted, while trying not to intrude into her grieving,” Mdm Ho said.

It was in the middle of those two first weeks of April, when she was tidying up the house, that she “came across small interesting items which I thought were significant in papa’s life”, including a “puzzling telegram about a Battleship arrival”.

“Loong immediately knew its significance, and identified 4 items that he thought it would be useful to lend to NHB which was organising an exhibition on papa’s life,” she said, referring to PM Lee. “These included the Battleship telegram and the John Laycock letter, which would be related to what papa did during the Postmen’s strike.”

The telegram was sent in 1958 by Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who was then a practising lawyer, to his law firm. It read: “ARRIVING TODAY BATTLESHIP = LEEKUANYEW”.  PM Lee had earlier recounted how his father had wanted steam boat for dinner on his return from Sarawak but had written “battleship” instead, in order to save words and money, as telegrams were charged by the word.

Mdm Ho said that in the two weeks after the funeral, she had also “done things like organising papa's ties, and you confirmed that you were agreeable for NHB to come and pick what they wanted - they mostly wanted the relevant ties to match what papa wore during various historical events”.

After Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s will was read on April 12, 2015, she again kept both Mr Lee Hsien Yang and Dr Lee posted on all that she had done including the items loaned to NHB, Mdm Ho said. “In fact, I was in the basement working with the maids, when I was asked to join you and Fern, as well as Loong and Ling, for the reading of the will,” she added.

On Thursday evening, Mr Lee Hsien Yang put up a list from NHB documenting the items which it had received as donations. Mr Lee Hsien Yang had initially accused Mdm Ho of taking the items while Mr Lee Kuan Yew was gravely ill in hospital. But Mdm Ho was overseas then, and it turned out that NHB had made a “clerical error” which resulted in wrongly-recorded dates.  In any case, Mdm Ho said on Friday, “there would not be any reason for me to rummage or tidy up papa’s things when he was in the hospital – that is not me nor my values”.

Following NHB’s admission of the error in dates  - which showed the items were transferred after Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s death – Mr Lee Hsien Yang had earlier said: “This is even more troubling. By LKY’s will, the estate’s residual items, such as personal documents, fall under the absolute discretion of the executors Wei Ling and myself. Unapproved removal of these items, even by a beneficiary, constitutes both theft and intermeddling. Ho Ching is not an executor or a beneficiary to our father’s estate. We also still do not understand how she is a proper contact representative for the PMO.”

Among the items transferred were four documents and Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s iconic “red box”, a briefcase he used for his working documents. They included a memo from the Director of Posts, dated Feb 11, 1952, telling the Postal and Telecommunications Uniformed Staff Union that the British government had no objection to Mr Lee Kuan Yew representing them in their dispute with the colonial government.

The other items were the telegram from Mr Lee Kuan Yew, and a document from British lawyer John Laycock, the founder of Laycock and Ong, dated April 13, 1953, where Laycock wrote that members of the firm, including Mr Lee, were spending too much time on “lengthy arbitrations or commissions on wages etc which are now all the vogue”.

The list posted by Mr Lee Hsien Yang shows that most of the items were received by the NHB on Feb 6, 2015 — which turned out to be wrong after NHB admitted the clerical error — except for the “red box” which was received on March 27, 2015, four days after Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s death.

Weighing in via his own Facebook post on Friday night, PM Lee wrote: "Questions had been raised about (Mdm Ho Ching's) role in the loan of some of these items to NHB. The loan was openly done, and for a good cause – an exhibition remembering my father soon after he died."