SINGAPORE — After contesting sedition charges over seven days of hearing, Yang Kaiheng, the former editor of now-defunct sociopolitical site The Real Singapore (TRS), has had a change of heart and told the court on Wednesday (June 22) he intends to plead guilty.

The 27-year-old’s trial was scheduled to resume on Wednesday but has been adjourned till Friday where he is expected to plead guilty to six counts of sedition involving articles that had been published on TRS.

A seventh sedition charge and an eighth charge over failing to produce financial statements on the website’s advertising revenue to the police will be taken into consideration in sentencing him.

Prosecutors said that Yang had indicated his intention to plead guilty last week. His lawyer Choo Zheng Xi declined to comment on what prompted his client’s decision.

Yang faces up to three years’ jail and/or a fine of up to S$5,000 for each charge of sedition.

Yang had initially denied all involvement in the distribution and proprietorship of TRS, which ran the seven seditious articles for which he is charged.

These “particularly egregious” articles, in the words of the prosecution, included a Feb 4, 2015, article that erroneously claimed a Filipino family had caused an incident between the police and Thaipusam participants by complaining about the playing of musical instruments during the procession.

The other charges relate to articles that were published between October 2013 and February last year that could incite ill-will and hostility among various groups in Singapore, such as ethnic Indians, Philippine nationals and individuals from the People’s Republic of China working here.

His charges were identical to his wife’s, 23-year-old Ai Takagi, who had pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 months’ jail in March.

Yang previously testified that Takagi took charge of running TRS and its accounts, and said his involvement was “ad hoc”.

During the trial, prosecutors had charged that the couple had “maliciously” exploited racial and xenophobic faultlines and deliberately sowed discord between Singaporeans and foreigners here for “nothing more than their self-interest”.

The couple had been “patently motivated” by commercial greed, said the prosecution, which tendered evidence that showed that TRS raked in about A$474,000 in advertising revenue from December 2013 to April last year, and at its peak saw 3.2 million unique visitors a month.

When he last took the stand in early April, Yang admitted that he had lied on multiple occasions in court, such as about when he and Takagi got together, as well as when they set up the Facebook page “Petition to remove Tin Pei Ling as MP”.

TRS was ordered to cease operations in May last year, after the Media Development Authority said it had broken rules under the Internet Code of Practices by publishing articles that were against public interest and national harmony.