Cecilia Sue Siew Nang
29 September 2012. Former Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) chief Ng Boon Gay’s trial has been ranked as the most talked about topic in Singapore. Thirty to forty people qued up for a seat in the 32 seat court room. In the fourth day of the trial of ex-Central Narcotics Bureau Chief Ng Boon Gay on Friday, The defence lawyers accused Sue of lying and wanted to know whether she lied to the CPIB or is lying to the court. “Are you aware that perjury in court may open you to criminal prosecution?” asked Senior Counsel Tan Chee Meng at the start of Friday’s proceedings. Ms Sue replied: “That’s absolutely sure, so I will not do that.” The court heard that the state’s key witness, Cecilia Sue, made an earlier statement that she had a pregnancy scare during her relationship with the accused. “When I was pregnant in the first quarter of 2010, I asked Boon Gay what if the child was his,” she said in a statement to the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau on 3 May 2012. “At that time, I felt Boon Gay was an irresponsible man because he did not want to show responsibility and he did not want to care either. He broke my heart,” she had declared. “It was then I decided to end my relationship with him. After I told him that I wanted to end the physical intimacy in September/October 2010, I did not remember giving him any indication that I liked him.” Tan then pointed out to Sue’s statement to CPIB on 20 December last year wherein she said that after the first sexual encounter with Ng, there were more than ten times she engaged with oral sex with the former civil servant. The defence lawyers were trying to prove that Sue and Ng had an intimate relationship. Asked to explain the inconsistencies in her statements, Sue said she was very tired and didn’t scrutinize her answers. A few other discrepancies between her testimony for the prosecution and her statements to the CPIB were highlighted by the defence counsel in the cross-examination. In another CPIB statement, she had said that she felt her liking for Ng “was strong enough to contemplate divorcing” her husband. However, in response to Tan’s questioning, Sue denied that was lying to save herself from prosecution or to save her marriage. She then claimed that she knew Ng “has problems with his wife” and that “his wife cannot give him certain things”. When the trial continued in the afternoon, the defence focused on Sue’s knowledge of what influences the tender process at CNB. Tan asked her if Ng used his power and position to influence the approval of tender, to which Sue said it was difficult to answer because she did not know what Ng had done. Since taking the witness stand on Wednesday, Ms Sue has told the court that she did not have a relationship with Ng and was forced to have oral sex with him on four occasions in return for him showing her employers favour in tender bids. The counsel then asked if Sue did not know what Ng has done, how she could say the ex-CNB chief influenced it. The witness then changed her statement. “Can i rephrase? He can influence, that’s it,” she said. “But did he?” asked Tan. “I don’t know,” she replied. The lawyer then proceeded to read out Sue’s statement to CPIB wherein she had said that Ng did not and cannot influence the tender process at the anti-narcotics bureau. “Boon Gay works on the recommendation of his subordinates. It’s not possible to influence the results of those tenders,” he quoted her as saying in the statement. Also, according to her CPIB statement, she claimed she spoke to Ng about a CNB project but he did not want to discuss it, and, furthermore, when she joined Oracle and was forced to deal with Ng directly, he had said Ng told her he would leave it to his team. Defence layers also tried to establish that besides Ng Boon Gay, Sue knew several officers from agencies under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) well. This was shown in the sales forecast charts she had prepared shortly after she joined Oracle Corp Singapore in November last year. Referring to the charts, defence counsel noted that she had categorised at least four people from the agencies as those she had a “high degree of contact” with. Mr Leslie Ong, the managing director of Oracle Corp Singapore who was back on the stand Thursday, said that among them were two senior officials from two MHA agencies, and two other officers from the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) identified in court as “Paul” and “Andrew”. Mr Ong requested that the officers from the other agencies and their agencies, to be not named as it was “highly confidential” company information. The charts were admitted as evidence in court on Wednesday at the request of Ng’s lawyers. They were to use them to gauge the importance of CNB’s business to Ms Sue’s bottom line, and to find out how well she knew other officials in MHA. Among other things, the charts listed the people who would approve IT spending, rated them based on how much influence they had in IT procurement matters, and how close they were to Ms Sue. They also contained projections of Oracle’s businesses with the various organisations. Mr Ong said Ms Sue had built up relationships with a number of people from MHA. It was precisely because of this and her experience in handling government accounts that she was hired to head the MHA account at Oracle. The court also heard that although Oracle had projected some $3.2 million worth of deals with MHA and its agencies for three financial years starting 2012, business with CNB did not feature in its forecast.
