*Event date: 2025-02-17.*
Singapore’s Leader of the Opposition, Pritam Singh, was convicted on 2025-02-17 of two counts of lying to a parliamentary committee and fined the maximum S$7,000 on each charge. The case centres on testimony he gave to the Committee of Privileges during its investigation into former Workers’ Party MP Raeesah Khan.
The court found that Singh had given false testimony about the handling of Khan’s fabricated account of accompanying a sexual assault victim to a police station. According to the judge, the evidence from Khan supported the view that Singh told her to take the lie to the grave. The court said a message needed to be sent about the importance of truthful information under oath, and that language framed the case as a matter of institutional integrity rather than party politics.
Singh has rejected the findings and is appealing against both conviction and sentence. That matters because the outcome is not yet final and the legal process is still ongoing. For now, though, the conviction is a major blow to one of Singapore’s best-known opposition figures and to the Workers’ Party, which has tried to present itself as a serious parliamentary force.
The case also connects to the wider Raeesah Khan scandal, which has continued to shadow Singaporean politics since she admitted making up a story about accompanying a sexual assault victim to the police. Singh’s role in managing that fallout is what brought him before the committee, and the verdict leaves him arguing not only about personal culpability but about whether he was fairly treated by the process.
The sentence is notable for another reason: it is severe but not life-changing in the way prison would be. The BBC report says Singh is appealing and continues to face the political consequences of a conviction that came from a hearing about honesty in parliament. In a system where reputation and discipline matter enormously, the court’s finding may prove as damaging as the financial penalty.
The committee case grew out of Raeesah Khan's admission that she had invented a story about escorting a sexual assault victim to the police. The judge said Singh's conduct required a clear message about honesty under oath, which is why the maximum fine was imposed on both counts. Singh's appeal means the matter is not over, but the verdict already feeds into a broader debate about accountability in Singapore politics, where the opposition is small and parliamentary discipline is closely watched.
The financial penalty is capped at S$7,000 per count, so the judge imposed the maximum available while stopping short of a custodial sentence. That still leaves Singh facing the political cost of a conviction tied to parliament's standards for honesty. His appeal gives him a route to challenge the ruling, but the underlying issue will remain: whether one of Singapore's most prominent opposition leaders misled a committee investigating a scandal that already embarrassed his party.
Even so, the ruling already marks a serious blow because it turns a parliamentary ethics dispute into a criminal conviction with national political consequences, and Singh must now argue that the committee and the court got the facts wrong.
