Mr Lee Hsien Yang is currently embroiled in a legal case after two Singapore Cabinet ministers sued him for defamation.
As he’s not in Singapore, the ministers applied to the courts to serve him papers via Facebook Messenger.
This application has been granted, as Mr Lee confirmed that he had received the papers over this platform.
In a Facebook post on Saturday (16 Sep), Mr Lee said he’d just been served papers in the defamation case.
They were served on behalf of Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam, as well as Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan.
Both ministers are separately suing him for defamation, with their case conferences heard at the Supreme Court chambers on 5 Sep.
Source: Singapore Courts
On 28 Aug, the ministers applied to serve Mr Lee his defamation papers through Facebook in a process known as “substituted service”.
They did so after noting that the Singapore court is the most appropriate forum to hear the case.
Their lawyers from Davinder Singh Chambers had stated that it was impractical to serve the papers to Mr Lee in person as he is currently residing in the United Kingdom (UK), adding,
Facebook Messenger will probably be effective in bringing the court papers to the notice of the defendant.
Thus, a court order was sought to allow the papers to be served in PDF format and transmitted to Mr Lee’s Facebook profile page.
Mr Lee has since claimed that the courts had subsequently granted this permission.
Previously, Mr Lee, the younger son of founding father Lee Kuan Yew, had invited the ministers to sue him in the UK.
That’s because he was in the country when he made the Facebook post they’re suing him over, he reasoned.
However, after the ministers chose to sue him in the Singapore court, Mr Lee said in a 4 Sep post that “it is for the public to judge their reasons.”
The saga started when Mr Lee, the younger son of founding father Lee Kuan Yew, made a Facebook post on 23 July on the Ridout Road saga.
This earned him a Correction Direction under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), as the Ministry of Law said his post contained “false statements of fact.”
Mr Shanmugam and Dr Balakrishnan subsequently said they would sue Mr Lee if he didn’t apologise for the claims. The ministers had been cleared by the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) after an investigation.
However, Mr Lee didn’t apologise.
He and his wife Suet Fern left Singapore after the police asked them to attend an interview in June 2022. It was for a separate case of giving false evidence.
The couple hasn’t returned to Singapore since then.
Now that legal proceedings have commenced, it looks like there will be more to come in this saga.
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Featured image adapted from Lee Hsien Yang on Facebook and Brett Jordan on Unsplash.
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