Lee Hsien Yang's wife will face disciplinary tribunal: AGC
The Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) says Lee Hsien Yang’s wife Suet Fern will face a disciplinary tribunal appointed by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, and that she can put forward her case before the tribunal, in accordance with the Legal Profession Act.
In a statement on Tuesday (8 January), the AGC also insisted that the manner in which it has handled the alleged professional misconduct of Suet Fern, a lawyer with Morgan Lewis Stamford LLC, is consistent with how it has handled other similar cases.
“AGC therefore does not propose to comment any further on the merits of the matter. We would also like to remind all parties to be mindful not to prejudice the proper hearing of the matter,” an AGC spokesperson added.
The agency was responding to Hsien Yang’s Facebook post on Monday, in which the youngest child of the late Lee Kuan Yew insisted that Suet Fern was never his father’s lawyer. Hsien Yang was in turn responding to an earlier AGC statement that said it had referred his wife to the Law Society for her alleged role in preparing the late Lee’s last will.
AGC said that this had placed Suet Fern in a position of conflict and was a breach of the rules governing the conduct of lawyers because her husband was a beneficiary of the will.
But Hsien Yang denied this and added that AGC’s assertion that his wife had refused to respond to the agency’s questions on the matters was untrue. He also called on the AGC to release the full correspondence with his wife, as well as questioning the timing of the its decision and whether the public interest was being served.
On Sunday evening, Lee Kuan Yew’s daughter Wei Ling revealed that the AGC had lodged “more than 500 pages of complaint” against Suet Fern.
Hsien Yang has maintained that his father’s final will was drafted by lawyer Kwa Kim Li – which the latter has denied – and that Stamford Law Corporation, his wife’s law firm at the time, did not draft any of his father’s wills.
Instead, Suet Fern merely facilitated the witnessing and signing of the final will, according to Hsien Yang.
These are the latest developments in the long-running Lee saga, which first erupted on 14 June 2017 when Wei Ling and Hsien Yang issued a joint statement of “no confidence” against their elder brother and Singapore’s prime minister, Hsien Loong.
They claimed to have been threatened amid his pursuit of a personal agenda over their former family home at 38 Oxley Road and accused their brother of plotting to keep the house in order to build a political dynasty.
Related stories:
My wife was never Lee Kuan Yew’s lawyer: Hsien Yang
Lee Hsien Yang’s wife may have breached lawyer’s code of conduct: AGC
Wei Ling slams AGC’s complaint to Law Society about preparation of Lee Kuan Yew’s will
