(04-09-2023, 12:43 PM)Manthink Wrote: Me thinks OTC really "spoil" the market for any future (elected) President...His name will forever be used as a benchmark of "independence" as an executive position with limited role and power.
He is doing WHAT President need to do, Nothing wrong. His history been made will be Always remember as The People President a REAL Independent.
" Ong ran for the presidency under the PAP's endorsement. He ran against Chua Kim Yeow, former Accountant-General, for the office. A total of 1,756,517 votes were polled. Ong received 952,513 votes while Chua had 670,358 votes despite the former having a higher public exposure and a much more active campaign than Chua.
However, soon after his election to the presidency in 1993, Ong was tangled in a dispute over the access of information regarding Singapore's financial reserves. The government said it would take 56-man-years to produce a dollar-and-cents value of the immovable assets. Ong discussed this with the accountant-general and the auditor-general and eventually conceded that the government could easily declare all of its properties, a list that took a few months to produce. Even then, the list was not complete; it took the government a total of three years to produce the information that Ong requested.
In an interview with Asiaweek six months after stepping down from the presidency, Ong indicated that he had asked for the audit based on the principle that as an elected president, he was bound to protect the national reserves, and the only way of doing so would be to know what reserves—both liquid cash and assets—the government owned.
In the last year of his presidency, Ong found out, through the newspapers, that the government aimed to submit a bill to Parliament to sell the Post Office Savings Bank to The Development Bank of Singapore Limited. The POSB was a government statutory board whose reserves were under the president's protection; the move according to Ong, was procedurally inappropriate and did not regard Ong's significance as the guardian of the reserves; he had to call and inform the government of this oversight. Still, the sale proceeded, and The Development Bank of Singapore Limited still owns the Post Office Savings Bank.
Ong was appointed as Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG) by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in 1998.[29]
Ong decided not to run for a second term as president in 1999 partially because of the death of his wife. He was succeeded by S. R. Nathan. In his farewell speech on 30 August 1999, he stated
Having a good government is better than having a good President to check on a bad government. Singaporeans are fortunate to have a clean and able government for the last 35 years. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ong_Teng_Cheong
His last quote full of " hidden meaning " if one decode it. He actually indirectly say his own PAP party zzzz
![](https://i.imgur.com/CLvY2jA.png")
![[Image: 1130566.jpg]](https://www.roots.gov.sg/CollectionImages/1130566.jpg)
