Singapore ex-Transport Minister Iswaran pleads guilty in graft trial

Charges reduced from 25 to five as rare corruption trial involving a senior politician gets under way in city state.

Singapore’s former transport minister, S Iswaran, has pleaded guilty to accepting gifts worth thousands of dollars while in office, after months of strenuously denying the charges against him.

Iswaran, who resigned in January, pleaded guilty to five charges on Tuesday, Singapore’s ChannelNewsAsia reported, on the first of three days that had been set aside for his trial.

The 62-year-old admitted to four charges of breaching Section 165 of the Penal Code, which forbids public servants from obtaining anything valuable from someone involved with them in an official capacity, as well as one charge of obstruction of justice.

He was initially charged with 35 offences. Those charges would be taken into account for sentencing.

“Your Honour, I plead guilty,” Iswaran told the judge after the charges were read to him in court.

Iswaran, best known in Singapore for bringing the Formula One (F1) night race to the city-state, was the first political officeholder in Singapore in almost four decades to face trial for corruption.

The father of three was accused of accepting more than 400,000 Singapore dollars ($306,000) in gifts from two businessmen: property tycoon and hotelier Ong Beng Seng, who was also instrumental in securing the F1 race, and Lum Kok Seng, a man with strong ties to grassroots organisations in Iswaran’s former electoral ward. The gifts included tickets to West End shows, flights, bottles of whisky, English Premier League match tickets and a Brompton bicycle that Iswaran was given for his birthday.

Neither Ong nor Lum have been charged with any offence.

Civil servants and political officeholders are prohibited from accepting gifts valued above 50 Singapore dollars ($38) in the course of their duties.

Iswaran had paid back 380,000 Singapore dollars ($295,000) to the state and will forfeit the items he received, the Straits Times reported.

Singapore was ranked the world’s fifth least corrupt country in 2023 by Transparency International.

The last corruption investigation involving a minister was in 1986, when former Minister for National Development Teh Cheang Wan was accused of accepting 1 million Singapore dollars ($775,000) in bribes. Teh took his own life before investigations could be completed.

The Iswaran case emerged as the former Speaker of Parliament Tan Chuan Jin – a man once tipped as a possible future prime minister – resigned after admitting to an extramarital affair with a fellow governing party lawmaker who also quit.