SINGAPORE: K Shanmugam, the minister of law and home affairs, announced on Monday( Jul3) that he had decided to put his family’s house up for sale and had moved in as a tenant at 26 Ridout Road.
The minister told parliament in a ministerial statement that he was” never making any money from the change in rent” while deciding on the price and rented out his family home.
Early in May, after a string of online content by opposition legislator and Reform Party leader Kenneth Jeyaretnam, Mr. Shanmugam and Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan raised concerns about the leasing of two black-and-white imperial houses along Ridout Road.
In his papers, Mr. Jeyaretnam questioned whether the ministers were” paying less than the fair market value” for the components.
On May 23, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong declared that Teo Chee Hean, Senior Minister, may conduct a review of the situation.
There was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing or preferential treatment of the two Cabinet ministers, according to two investigation reports by Mr. Teo and the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau( CPIB ) that were released on June 28.
In 2018, Mr. Shanmugam leased 26 Ridout Road for the first time, and three years later, he renewed it.
The secretary responded to the barrage of inquiries regarding his ownership of state property by saying:” Some people will understand that choosing one’s house is typically a personal and private matter.
However, I am aware that the boundaries between what is private and public may not always be obvious as an elected official whose power is granted to me by the respect of Singaporeans. But I’ll talk about them.
ABOUT WHY HE WAS RENTING A House
Mr. Shanmugam explained his decision to put his family’s home, a good-class house where he had been residing prior to June 2018, up for sale while citing the need to rent out his house.
This came after he looked over his finances in 2016 and realized that” too much of( his ) savings” were clogged up in the family home they had purchased with the help of his previous legal income.
” Based on what I was making in the private sector, I had assumed a future stream of income when I bought my family home. My money changed after I became a parson, and I discovered that too much of my pocketbook were concentrated in one home, he claimed.
It would be wiser not to have the majority of one’s benefits in one resource, I was told. I therefore made the decision to sell my family’s house.
Mr. Shanmugam claimed he made the decision to leave and sit in a rental property in order to get ready for the purchase. He made the decision to submit an offer for 26 Ridout Road in 2018 after considering many rental options, including black-and-white homes that he had” much liked.”
The offer, which was made based on advice from his real estate agent, was S$ 25, 000 ( US$ 18, 500 ) per month. According to him, this would be a” good offer” based on rent for comparable properties at the time, taking into account the built-up area and the property’s condition.
The Singapore Land Authority( SLA) then returned with a counter-offer of S$ 26, 500, which the minister claimed he” accepted without further conversations.”
When I accepted SLA’s counter-offer, I had no notion what the manual book or the lowest lease was. These were inside SLA decisions that I wasn’t aware of, he continued.
The SLA appraiser who reviewed the guide book of 26 Ridout Road, according to Mr. Teo, who made a split ministerial statement on Monday, did not know the personality of the prospective client and just discovered that the tenant was Mr Shanmugam after the incident was covered by the media.
Additionally, they were unaware of the rental sum that SLA’s rental division had agreed upon with the tenant, he continued. & nbsp,