By On Thursday (23 January), Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s son Li Hongyi (HY) asked his cousin Li Shengwu (LSW) to leave him out of all the issues he has with the Singapore government.
“I don’t know what’s going on between you and the government, but I’ve got nothing to do with it. Could you please leave me out of this?” PM Lee’s son said in a Facebook post.
It appears that HY said this following LSW’s announcement to remove him from his Facebook friends list.
On Wednesday (22 January), LSW – a Harvard economics professor and the son of Lee Hsien Yang – revealed that he is withdrawing from the contempt of court proceedings instituted by the Attorney General Chambers (AGC) against him.
He said that the AGC had recently applied to strike out parts of his own defence affidavit “with the result that they will not be considered at the trial”.
PM Lee’s nephew also alleged that the AGC had “demanded that these parts be sealed in the court record, so that the public cannot know what the removed parts contain”.
“This is not an isolated incident, but part of a broader pattern of unusual conduct by the AGC. For instance, when arguing jurisdiction in the court of appeals, the AGC argued that a new piece of legislation should be retroactively applied against me. The court saw it as unfair for the new legislation to apply retrospectively,” he noted in a Facebook post.
As such, LSW said that he will no longer “continue to participate in the proceedings against me”, as he “will not dignify the AGC’s conduct by my participation”.
At the end of his post, he noted that he will “continue to be active on Facebook, and will continue to regard to my friends-only Facebook posts as private”.
LSW added that he had removed his cousin, HY from his Facebook friends list.
As expected, LSW’s statement about his cousin did not go down too well with PM Lee’s son.
HY said that he “really tried not to get involved as far as possible” with all the issues, even though he can’t prove it.
“If there’s something I’ve done that’s led you to believe otherwise, I would be happy to talk with you about it. It’s a bit disconcerting to be repeatedly publicly accused of undermining democracy without understanding why,” he wrote.
He added, “I would prefer not to have done this over public Facebook posts. But I suppose that’s how we communicate nowadays.”
While HY has previously denied having any political ambition, but he has been rumored to be active in grassroots activities. He is also being aggressively promoted by the government as the face of the Smart Nation Initiative such as the development of the Parking.sg app along with other projects under Govtech, an agency directly under the Prime Minister’s Office that is run by his father.