MFA director-general sentenced to 1 week jail for lying about use of diplomatic bag

Mr Oh previously admitted to providing MFA’s deputy secretary for management with false information regarding his request to a colleague to send a package containing luxury watches through the diplomatic bag service in January 2023.

He agreed to help a Chinese national female friend, Ms Jiang Si, bring her watches from China to Singapore.

On 12 January 2023, Mr Oh asked a colleague at Singapore’s embassy in Beijing to send the package through the diplomatic bag.

Mr Oh falsely told his MFA colleague that the package was from his friend’s parents, whom he claimed was a Chinese diplomat, to increase the likelihood of compliance with his request.

Ms Jiang’s parent was not a diplomat; Mr Oh misrepresented her status to persuade his colleague, Dion Loke Cheng Wang.

A sealed package containing 21 luxury watches, a ring, and about seven children’s books was sent to Oh’s colleague’s address in Beijing.

Due to the suspension of the diplomatic bag service at the time, the colleague carried the package in his luggage on a flight from China to Singapore on 17 January last year.

At Changi Airport, ICA officers screened the luggage and opened the sealed package containing the watches.

Mr Oh was charged for abusing diplomatic bags in Nov last year

The incident was reported to the police, and MFA was informed. CPIB also initiated an investigation.

On the morning of 19 Jan, Ong Eng Chuan, MFA’s then-deputy secretary for management instructed Oh to provide a written account of how the package was brought into Singapore.

Fearing disciplinary action that could affect his career, Oh decided to lie, claiming the watches belonged to his father, hoping for leniency.

He communicated this false account to MFA in an email on 19 Jan 2023 and repeated it in a statement to CPIB on 20 Jan 2023.

The lie was uncovered when Oh later admitted to CPIB that a friend, not his father, had asked him to transport the luxury watches.

Judge Sripathy-Shanaz rejected the argument by both defence and prosecution that Mr Oh’s lie only concealed the “true ownership” of the package, stating it sought to cast the incident in “a vastly different light.”

She noted that Mr Oh lied to prevent the deputy secretary from probing further into the incident.

The judge stated that his falsehood involved “misleadingly recasting the predicate act as an innocuous instance of helping his father transport personal items, when he was actually doing so at the behest of a third-party foreign national who, as the defence itself accepted, ‘wanted to avoid the hassle of too many explanations’ and sought to ‘avoid’ scrutiny from the authorities.”

The judge emphasized the importance of internal investigations by public institutions for maintaining transparency, accountability, and public trust.

“The potential harm to the public interest is all the more pronounced, real and significant, when a high-ranking public servant such as Mr Oh, seeks to subvert the internal investigations of the public institution he serves. Such a breach requires a strong response.”

The judge found it “particularly aggravating” that Oh took “active steps to bolster the deception” by informing his father of the lie he intended to tell, aiming for his father to corroborate his story if needed.